Evidently New Yorker contributing writer Graciela Mochkofsky hasn’t gotten the message yet, which has been repeated over and over again for the past few years, that a vast majority of the Spanish speaking community in the United States finds the incredibly awkward word “Latinx” to be both absurd as well as offensive.
2020 Washington Post reporter Jose A. Del Real wrote that “Users of “Latinx” are accused of being out of touch with working-class Latino communities and of practicing linguistic imperialism on the Spanish language, which, like French and Italian, is grammatically gendered.”
Mochkofsky’s Friday story, “A Different Kind of Bid to Win Over the Spanish-Language Media Audience,” about a liberal network purchasing 18 Spanish language radio stations uses the mostly despised word “Latinx” a total of 21 times which threatens to throw more gasoline on the fire of existing controversy in the local Miami radio market.
Radio Mambi is Miami’s conservative talk radio station. Only one among those 18 stations has conservative talk. This article doesn’t do much more than fluff the purchase for the liberal New YorkerReadership
Many local listeners of Radio Mambi are not happy with this sale as can be seen in the June 9 Miami Herald, “‘They are not going to shut us up.’ Cuban exiles vow to boycott if Radio Mambí is ‘silenced’”. Radio Mambi’s listening audience will be even more alienated by the fact that Radio Mambi was censored 21 times by the liberal ivory tower New Yorker who used offensive language “Latinx” to approve of the sale.
Now is the time for New Yorker inadvertent slaps in the face of the Spanish language radio listeners with the “Latinx” countdown starting with the story’s subtitle, “A new company has acquired eighteen Spanish-language radio stations, serving ten of the largest Latinx-populatedCities in the country
Now, let’s move on to the text. Here are the twenty remaining “Latinx words” that Democrats warned clueless liberals not to use.
…Such efforts are often purely commercial in nature—they seek to monetize the ever-growing U.S. Latinx population—and investments tend to not be sustained over time. Now a new set of investors has entered the field, with what it says is a long-term plan, and it’s creating some excitement in progressive Latinx circles.
Stephanie Valencia, an entrepreneur who was a special assistant to President Barack Obama, and Jess Morales Rocketto, an activist who worked with both Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaigns, recently raised eighty million dollars to launch the Latino Media Network, a distribution and content-creation hub intended to help Latinx listeners “make sense of the avalanche of information” that hits them, Morales Rocketto told me. In a first move, eighteen Spanish-language radio station serving ten major cities were acquired by the company. LatinxThe country’s most populous cities. This announcement is more than two years after a debate in the country about right-wing disinformation campaign targeting at Latinx voters. Chuck Rocha, a Democratic Party strategist and former Bernie Sanders campaign adviser, called the purchase a “bold move” and told me that it was refreshing to see an effort “to stave off misinformation that is running rampant in Spanish radio.”
Radio is still a strong medium for communication among radio listeners Latinx communities. “Radio listenership is higher among Hispanic consumers than among any other ethnic group. Ninety-five percent of Hispanic consumers tune into the radio in an average week,” Jessica Retis, who was recently named the director of the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona and is an expert on LatinxMedia, according to a report for 2019. (The average national listenership was ninety-two percent. Nielsen reports that last year, more than one third of listeners were on Nielsen. LatinxPeople listened more to radio during the covid-19 epidemic than before. This report is from Latinx Media research I did for Craig Newmark Graduate Schools of Journalism (cuny) revealed that only 37 stations in Spain produce original content. Most focus on sports and music while others are focused on talk shows, news, and religious programming.
Note that the name of the company that bought the radio stations is the LATINO Media Network, not the LATINX Media Network. Mochkofsky was so intent on forcing “Latinx” down readers’ throats, that she forgot about the irony.
With eleven more to go, we are almost at the halfway point of “Latinx”, a hilariously ridiculous overuse of the mostly unshunned word.
Recent disinformation campaigns were launched by some radio stations (especially in Florida) among Spanish-speaking voters. These efforts have been accused of aiding Republican gains. Latinx communities. Latinx voters were crucial to Joe Biden’s triumph in 2020, but thirty-eight per cent of them voted for Donald Trump, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis, a ten-point increase when compared with 2016. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Trump’s upswing was more than twenty points, and he managed to win a county in the overwhelmingly Latinx Rio Grande Valley, in Texas.
…Valencia—who is also the founder of Equis, a firm focussed on raising Latinx civic participation, and who has researched how disinformation circulates among Spanish-speaking communities—was one of the prominent voices sounding an alarm about this shift. In a postmortem analysis of the 2020 elections, Equis concluded that the false narrative that the Democratic Party was embracing Socialism was “a national phenomenon” among LatinxAbout 40% of voters expressed concern.
The most concerned about Socialism’s specter were… LatinxThe majority of voters who have used WhatsApp news and other right-wing media sources for information consumption were from India.
These stations are some of the most powerful in the world. Latinx markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Las Vegas, McAllen, and Fresno—cities that are home to a large swath of the LatinxPopulation in the U.S.
Marisa Franco is the Mijente’s national director. Latinx group, sees “great potential” in the Latino Media Network.
…But, he added, “the House campaign and the House races are doing just as bad a job as they have always done” with Latinx communities.
Almost done. Now for the final part of “Latinx”, which appears to be aiming for a Guinness World Record in overuse within a single story.
Valencia and Morales Rocketto say that Latino Media Network’s creation isn’t a temporary political decision, but rather an ongoing investment in Latino Media Network. LatinxThe acquisition of radio stations by community is just one step of building a hub for content creation that will include podcasts, YouTube production, and other media.
Because few embrace the hated term, the “Latinx Community” seems almost inexistent. One wonders how this effort can be extended into the “content creation hub.” This ridiculously Latinx-ridden article may have already hampered future Latino Media Network efforts.
Notice: Only a couple of sentences were in the New YorkerAn article that did not contain “Latinx” There were only a handful.
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