Annotations for People: Alverio-diane

And it's not just about objectivity either. It's about your perspective that they both talked about. Just this past week, a national -- I won't mention the name of the show -- a national -- one of the network magazine shows aired a piece on 936, the tax issue with Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico, and I, as a viewer and possibly as a journalist, I'm sure, and especially as a Puertorriqueña, was watching it, and I thought, "But they're not giving the entire story."

I happen to know the background of 936 just because I am Puerto Rican and I know the history, and the way the story was presented, it just explained the tax law and why the financial benefits the company, but it never delved into why this was instituted in the first place, what the U.S. role has been in Puerto Rico that necessitated a tax reform, a tax act like this. And I felt that the viewer was gypped. The viewer that was non-Hispanic, non-Puerto Rican like I, did not get the correct information in which to form his or her opinion so that what I'm saying is that Latino journalists bring that with them, information that other non-Hispanic journalists may not have or don't bother to go after.

We as Latino journalists have been discussing that in the last couple of years. And it's kind of an identity question. It's part of the growing pains of the organization. And I think -- I was attending a panel recently, and someone said it quite well. By the very fact that we have banded together as Latino journalists, we are a civil rights organization, whether all our members want to accept it or not, because our goals are primarily to increase the numbers of Latinos in the industry, to improve coverage of the Hispanic community. If those aren't civil rights issues, I don't know what are.

We move forward with a determination and desire of so many Latinos before us, and that is to achieve equality. For us, that is to achieve equality in the newsrooms of this country. We ask for nothing more, for nothing less.