gomez tv

A Media Life Magazine story today reports that Los Angeles company Liberman Broadcasting is all atwitter over their new Estrella TV network, which Liberman claims will "serve all Hispanics in the US," even though the network will offer programming only in Spanish - a language most Hispanics in the US do not speak. Liberman apparently suffers from the delusion that Hispanics want more of the abomination pictured at right. Hint: We don't.

Reporter Kevin Downy, like so many of his ilk, wrote the story erroneously using "Hispanic" as a synonym for "Spanish-speaker," even though common sense and years of social science studies and statistics prove this equation to be false.

In a study on language dominance among Hispanics by generation, the Pew Hispanic Center found that among first generation Hispanics, only 72 percent spoke mostly Spanish. In the second generation, the number dropped to a stunned 7 percent.

By the third generation, precisely ZERO percent of Hispanics in the US use Spanish as their main language, according to the Pew study (not to be confused with the P-U study on frijole useage among Latinos by generation).

Furthermore, the US census reports that the vast majority of Hispanics in the US are NOT immigrants (aka not first generation), which leads to only one logical conclusion: Most Hispanics here are not watching TV in Spanish. We will repeat this for Liberman's sake: Most Hispanics in the US are not watching TV in Spanish.

Furthermore, Gomez invites Liberman and others to consider, for a moment, that many Spanish-speaking Hispanics in the US might also not be watching TV in Spanish, for the simple fact that much of it is insulting, banal, racist, sexist and mind-numbingly lame. Gomez has no stats on this particular possibility, other than in Gomez's own various and far-flung families, whose antecedents tended to be smart people who left their old countries to come the US because things were supposed to be better here. Hint: Spanish-language TV in the US is not better than it is back home.

Gomez thinks Liberman Broadcasting would be better off starting a rival to SiTV, the only English-language network aimed at Hispanics in the US. SiTV does a very good job of attracting horny adolescent males, and those who wish they still met those criteria, but has not yet established much of a base beyond that. Gomez thinks this is because SiTV believes acculturated Hispanics think only of "knockin' da boots" and "pimpin' da rides" and "clocking da model hos". Gomez is just guessing, of course.

Gomez is consistently amazed by the ghastly mix of gullible greed and goofiness among gringo businessmen who want to get rich off Latinos/Hispanics. Gomez thinks the problem stems from said businessmen not actually knowing any Hispanics other than those who run shady marketing firms aimed at gutting guilty gullible gringos.

Gomez is also disturbed by these sloppy stories because, in the end, most decision makers in the entertainment industry believe them, just like Scientologists believe a big spaceship will one day rescue us all from Tom Cruise; as a result, the mainstream networks don't bother to include Hispanics/Latinos in the English-language programming that most of us actually watch, and we remain all but invisible in our own nation because, as we know, if it doesn't happen on TV, it didn't happen.