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A personal appeal might prod CNN

Gabriel Cazares of Clearwater makes an excellent point.

On Oct. 23 Cazares was watching CNN's live coverage of Gov. Jeb Bush's comments to Floridians as Hurricane Wilma, with 115 mph winds, was bearing down on South Florida. A grim-faced Bush was giving residents important information about the storm's track and how they should prepare.

As he has done during past storms, the governor concluded his remarks and then said that he wanted to say a few words to the state's Spanish-speaking residents. He began repeating his remarks in his fluent Spanish, but CNN cut away to program host Wolf Blitzer. As soon as Bush had finished speaking Spanish, CNN went back to him, with a comment from Blitzer: "Let's get back to the governor. . . . He's resumed speaking in English."

Cazares was angry at CNN. Why shouldn't the state's Spanish speakers get the benefit of hearing Bush's important warnings about the hurricane, he wondered?

"I think it's a lack of consideration for a large portion of the population," Cazares said. "Here, when a program was concerned with people's lives, CNN did not think it was important."

Cazares, a former mayor of Clearwater and a longtime activist in minority affairs, may be 85 years old, but he isn't tired of fighting battles. He fired off a protest letter to CNN and made contact with like-minded people in the League of United Latin American Citizens.

LULAC is already boycotting CNN because of comments made about illegal immigrants by CNN host Lou Dobbs. At a LULAC meeting days after Hurricane Wilma passed, many members said they also were offended that CNN didn't carry the governor's remarks in Spanish, as other television networks did, and they saw it as another example of CNN's insensitivity to Hispanics.

A CNN spokeswoman contacted via e-mail by a St. Petersburg Times reporter said that the network has a separate Spanish-language channel that carried hurricane coverage and sound bites from Bush's remarks.

CNN's wall-to-wall coverage of hurricanes tends to get repetitive, with anchors and reporters often struggling to put a fresh spin on the same limited information. The network could easily spare two or three minutes on its primary channel to allow Bush to communicate life-saving information clearly to a population not necessarily fluent in English.

Cazares is one person, and CNN is a big network. If he wants his protest to have the desired effect, he should ask Gov. Bush to make a personal appeal to CNN to have more consideration when the next storm threatens.

[Last modified November 6, 2005, 01:59:22]