Columnist Says NBC Stands for ‘Nothing But Caucasians’

Washington Post Writer’s Group columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. gives some tough love to NBCU for not featuring enough Latinos as anchors of its newscasts. KNBC in LA gets called out for having zero Latino anchors in a city that’s 48 percent Latino.

Nararrette says NBC should stand for “Nothing But Caucasians,” at the top of his piece. But further down below, he argues something else entirely, something we haven’t really heard before–that the network is focusing only on one minority group, African Americans, at the expense of others.

Perhaps it was the historic breakthrough of the nation electing a black president that helped convince NBCUniversal executives that it wasn’t a bad idea to have on staff black commentators and news analysts.

Whatever the reason, it is easier for the media to ignore the largest minority group in the country than it is to ignore the second-largest. Meanwhile, at NBC – as on the other networks – Latinos are on permanent hiatus.

Hmmmm…African Americans have been historically underrepresented in the media. Though we don’t think Navarrette is saying networks should be hiring  less black people, it kind of comes across that way. The framing of his argument strikes us as unnecessarily divisive. That said, we take his larger point that America is a diverse place. When it comes to making minority media hires, diversity has to mean a makeup that is representative of the country, not just a random balance of non-white folks.

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