At nearly 16 percent of the American population, Hispanics are the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority group. And yet, Hispanics and the issues that pertain to them are woefully under-covered in the mainstream press.
That's the conclusion of an exhaustive study released this week by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
In a six-month study of more than 34,000 major-media news stories ending Aug. 9, the center found that less than 3 percent contained substantial references to Hispanics.
And the vast majority of those -- all but 57 -- were event-driven, meaning Hispanics were merely one of many elements in the story. In other words, about one in 600 stories were expressly devoted to "the life and times of this population group." Meanwhile, nearly one in six Americans is Hispanic.
Stories focusing on the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor dominated this year's Hispanic-focused coverage, constituting more than a third of it.
This was followed by coverage of the Mexican drug war and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, also known as "swine flu," which originated in Mexico.
Next in line was coverage of immigration, which, though a major topic of debate in Washington, D.C., amounted to less than 10 percent of all Hispanic-oriented coverage.
This, the report concluded, is a "reflection of the degree to which the issue largely fell off the radar during the early months of the Obama Administration."
While low, the 2.9 percent of stories focusing on Hispanics surpassed the amount of coverage devoted to other ethnic groups. Stories about Asians constituted 2.4 percent; African Americans, 2.2 percent. Coverage of Hispanics was surpassed only by coverage of Muslims (3.7 percent), but the vast majority of those stories were driven by events abroad.
"Hispanics were much more of an American story—58 percent of the coverage with significant references to Hispanics involved domestic news," the study reported.
