gomez tv

Gomez has a bad habit of reading the NY Times every day. Gomez almost always finds something in the paper to make us burp. The alphabet.

Today is no exception. Oh how Gomez wishes it were. Then again, Gomez wishes our teeth did not absorb the brown muck from our organic free-range grain-fed coffee. Gomez rarely gets what we wish for.

On the front of the Arts section, the NY Times has a story that purports to be about the lack of "diversity" in US network television.

The Times story, written by someone named Edward Wyatt, illustrates this "lack of diversity" with a photo of David Allen Greer, and by pointing out how few African Americans there are on TV, and talking about the fact that CNN fired DL Hughley from his show but did not replace him with another black guy.

Nowhere does the piece mention that Hughley's show sucked, even though he's funny on stage doing standup. Gomez wonders if the networks keep hiring mediocre people of color on purpose, so they can fire them and then the NY Times can write a half-assed story about diversity (aka Black people). Again.

Even worse, nowhere in the story does Wyatt bother to mention Hispanics/Latinos specifically at all. Even though there are more Hispanics in the United States than there are Canadians in all of Canada.

Gomez supposes we Spic-n-spans were meant to be pleased with the line "African Americans and other minorities," but true to our bitchy nature, Gomez is quite displeased.

Gomez would like to remind the NY Times that Latinos are, in fact, the nation's largest minority group, outnumbering African Americans. Gomez would like to remind the NY Times that there were more Latinos in prime-time leading rolls when I Love Lucy was on the air than there are now. Gomez would like to blow cheap Havana cigar smoke in Wyatt's scrotal face, and force him to watch the incredibly annoying El Pollo Loco commercial from 1999, 1000 times in a row.

Seriously, though. How funny is it that the NY Times pretends to take the high road on the "diversity" issue by tsk-tsking the networks for their lack of diversity, whilst simultaneously failing to take responsibility for the paper's own astonishing lack of awareness of this nation's new demographics?

Why, it's so funny you almost want to clap when you read this semi-related (and excellent) story by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic Monthly, predicting the NY Times, deeply in the red and ironically owned in large part by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, could shut its doors as soon as May of this year. Because nobody's reading it, except Gomez.

Gomez is sure the bow-tied Harvard-club bastards at the Old Gray Lady are scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong. Gomez can tell them, except they don't seem to like listening to Latinos much. If the NY Times would listen, Gomez would say something pithy, like: See here White Boy Journos, if you want to pretend a huge portion of your country simply doesn't exist, you should not be surprised when they, in turn, pretend you don't.