Sex doesn’t sell in Latino community

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Oct. 30, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

At an editorial staff meeting two weeks ago, Adriana Arevalo, news director at Univision, the Las Vegas Valley's highest-rated 6 o'clock news program, mentioned the tapes of calls to Metro Police about the alleged assault by Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons.

Local news media around the valley had just received copies of the tapes, five days after the incident.

Arevalo looked around the table at her editorial staff. "Should we open with this?" she asked.

A resounding lack of enthusiasm crossed the table and an item on school security eventually led the broadcast. The Gibbons story ended up getting only a brief mention later in the newscast.

That's more than it received on Telemundo, the second locally produced Spanish-language news program, which did not even mention the tapes that night.

Across the valley, at El Tiempo, a Spanish-language newspaper, associate editor Hernando Amaya closed that week's edition with a cover story on the Gibbons-Dina Titus race - a story without one word about the allegation by Las Vegan Chrissy Mazzeo that Gibbons had assaulted her in a parking garage shortly after they had drinks together at a restaurant bar.

In short, the story that has dominated front pages, newscasts and water cooler conversations in the non-Hispanic world for the past 2 1/2 weeks was not nearly as big a deal to Hispanics, who represent one of four people in the valley.

Univision didn't even mention the subject again until last Wednesday night, after Mazzeo and her attorney, as well as Gibbons' attorney, held press conferences.

"It had become more of a political scandal than a political sex scandal," Arevalo said.

At the last minute before his Wednesday deadline last week, Amaya also shepherded a story about the two press conferences onto inside pages of El Tiempo.

How English news outlets and Hispanic media played the story underlines significant cultural differences.

"As a general principle in Latin America, politics and personal life are two different things," said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, associate professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

"The inability to separate a person's professional behavior from his personal behavior - especially with relation to sex ... (is) a strictly American phenomenon," Garcia Bedolla said.

Arevalo eventually devoted about a minute to the story last Wednesday night, including translations of parts of Mazzeo's 911 calls.

"I could have given it more coverage, and translated more of the call, but they would have shut off the TV," she said.

Spanish-language media "is more issues-oriented when it comes to politics," Garcia Bedolla said.

"If you don't have enough to eat and you're working class, which is the community the media are targeting ... you don't worry about (sex scandals)."

But other factors also shape how Hispanics view sex scandals in politics, Garcia Bedolla said.

"The presumption is men cheat," she said, laughing. "It's not as shocking, the society isn't as puritanical."

Amaya said that "the codification of events like these is different" in Latin America, and doesn't recall ever reporting on a sex scandal during the four years he covered Colombia's federal government.

"Unfortunately, our scandals are more about corruption," he said.

As for how the current scandal will affect Hispanic voters, Arevalo thinks it won't.

She says most Hispanic voters will be looking more at where Titus and Gibbons stand when it comes to issues they care about, like crime, education and health.

Amaya concurs.

"A voter who has already decided to vote for Gibbons ... will stick to his decision," he said.

In any case, Amaya noted the obvious when it comes to the relationship between the Gibbons scandal and certain Hispanic voters: "People who don't speak English aren't going to have full knowledge about the issue."