Univision

Al’s
Loupe                                                                              Read Spanish Version

Univision’s
presidential debate was historic… and lousy

By
Alvaro F. Fernandez

“[Edmund]
Burke said that there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the
Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate, more important
far than they all.”

—
Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian and essayist

Another
Miami weekend saw the continued entourage of presidential candidates
visiting our area. Democrats — except for Sen. Joe Biden who opted
out — were here for the presidential debate held Sunday night at the
University of Miami.

It
is being called a historic event. Today’s marketing geniuses tend
to want to label everything. The debate may have been historic; I
would add that it was also historically lousy. Historic because it
was the first time U.S. presidential candidates debated before the
nation in Spanish. Lousy because the format turned out to be
difficult to follow. First, answers were hard to understand in any
language — translators spoke too quickly and over the voice of
candidates (whose voices in the background got in the way) creating,
at times, a chaotic situation. Second, because of the speed of
answers given by candidates, the translations were poor. There were a
number of words used by the translators I’ve never seen in any
Spanish dictionary.

Worse
yet, though, were some of the questions asked by the moderators —
both experienced and the top Univision anchors. Three questions stood
out as particularly baseless.

The
last question of the night was delivered by Univision’s Jorge
Ramos. He asked what the candidates felt is the biggest contribution
by Hispanics to this country. The question was open-ended and can be
answered differently by all 44 million of us who live here. And we’d
all be right. Another Ramos question was also a doozy… He wanted to
hear candidates commit to making Spanish the second language of the
country. Stupid, polarizing and a question not one of the candidates
dared address. I don’t blame them. What about the Germans, French,
Italians, Poles, Chinese, Japanese and so many other ethnicities who
live here? Should we rank their languages in order of importance to
the country, Mr. Ramos?

Finally,
the Cuba question — and there had to be a Cuba question since the
debate was held in Miami — was useless. What will happen in a Cuba
without Fidel Castro? they asked. So, I suppose, Univision is looking
for a philosopher president in 2009. There were numerous relevant
questions that could have been asked regarding Cuba: Will you support
an embargo some of you have called pointless and failed? Are you in
favor of limiting family travel to once every three years? Do you
agree with the fact that this country refuses to deal with the
realities of Cuba today?

Relevant
questions were out there by the score. Univision and their moderators
seemed to not want to ask them. The debate gave you the impression
that Latinos were saying, “We’ve arrived; we just don’t want to
rock the boat too much. We know our place…”

Then
again, the debate did take place in Miami, a city where few news
mediums dare challenge the status quo — so who was I to think the
Cuba question asked would be relevant to the times we live in?

On
Saturday, for example, Sen. Chris Dodd, the democrat from Connecticut
running for president, held a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel.
During the hour-long event he laid out plain as day his Cuba policy:
elimination of the embargo and TV Marti were two of the major points.
I was there, along with about 10 other Cubans from the Miami
community who support many of the senator’s ideas on Cuba, standing
behind Sen. Dodd.

A
television reporter from one of the Spanish-speaking stations asked
the senator how he would deliver the message to Cubans in Miami who
generally oppose such ideas. I looked around at the others standing
with me. Are we not part of this community? I wondered. And are we
not Cuban? again turning to look at my compatriots.

The
fact is that behind the senator stood persons like Alfredo Duran, who
once headed the Democratic Party in Florida. Also there was Tony
Zamora, once a Cuban American National Foundation lawyer. And what of
Annie Betancourt, the first Cuban democrat ever elected to the
Florida legislature?

Or
is the fact we all oppose what this reporter seemed to think was the
status quo here make us invisible in this area? 

In
the end what this awful Univision debate (which had the potential to
be a truly important event on the way to the presidential election of
next year) and the Dodd press conference demonstrated, one more time,
is that in Miami the media is a great big part of the problems we
face. They seem to forget that journalists are there to help bring
about solutions (it’s why they call us the Fourth Estate). But too
many South Florida reporters (and the medium they represent) seem to
want to be protagonists in this lousy soap opera we live in.