Annotations for People: Gonzalez-john

If the people who they've arrested are the right people and are the guilty parties, then I think it's going to be, it's going to send a message, obviously, that you're not going to be able to get away with this kind of stuff in the United States. Hopefully that will have a deterrent effect on any kind of a drug syndicates in the future.

Well, I think that one thing that has happened is you've had a spurt and a tremendous growth in the number of young people that have entered journalism as a profession. It seems to me that every conference, more and more young people appear to be eager to get into the profession. So I think that that's been a tremendous step. A lot of the work that NAHJ has done has been in nurturing and developing and helping to train those young college students and high school students, getting them scholarships and promoting their writing work. So that's been a tremendous step forward.

Unfortunately, on the other end, we don't seem to be retaining as many of the veteran journalists who apparently are coming up against walls and frustrations that they end up leaving the profession, so that on balance, the numbers of Latino journalists have not really grown qualitatively. There's this minute growth that is occurring -- part of a percentage point or a half a percentage point a year, but there's no real qualitative growth in the numbers of Latinos in the newsrooms of the United States.

You were born that way.

I think there's a tremendous ambivalence on the part of the managers of the newspaper and television and radio stations on this question. They would like to have Latino reporters in their organizations, supposedly, to be able to give them access to communities and information that they otherwise would not have. However, they would rather that those Latino reporters look at these communities through the same eyes that the non-Latino reporters look at them.

And a part of the great contradiction, I think, of American journalism is understanding that even when you are doing news reporting and trying to be fair and report reality, the fact is that reality is always looked at subjectively by each individual and that there is no such thing as objectivity. There are many individuals attempting to recreate objective reality and that, but you're always doing that subjectively because you're always doing it through how you were raised, what your parents taught you, the school that you went to, the things that you learned. That's the only eyes with which you have to look at the world. And that's true for all reporters.

But somehow, when it comes to Latinos working, let's say on a Latino's story, the editor may think that you will not look at that in an objective fashion, as if a white reporter covering that Latino story would look at it in an objective fashion.