Contributed by Samuel Martínez
The 2019 Robert G Mead, Jr. Lecture was presented on 14 November 2019 by Graciela Mochkofsky, Director of the Spanish-language Journalism Program, Executive Director of the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, and Tow Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Professor Mochkofsky joined the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in February 2016 as the first director of its bilingual Spanish-language Journalism Program.
A native of Argentina, Mochkofsky is the author of six nonfiction books in Spanish, two of them about the relationship between press and political power in her home country.
In her Mead Lecture, “News Media Portrayals of Latinxs Under Trump: A Call for Greater Visibility,” Mochkofsky addressed the need for greater representation of Latinx voices in the editorial offices and among the journalist ranks of the leading US print, on-line and electronic news media outlets. Her talk also underscored the need to overcome class, racial and gender biases that tilt the visibility of those Latinx faces now in leading media positions toward white, male standpoints.
At noon that same day, Professor Mochkofsky also gave a small luncheon colloquium talk, “Bilingual Journalism is on the Rise,” to students and faculty in UConn’s Department of Journalism. In that presentation, she focused on the findings of a survey of local Spanish-language news outlets, using data gathered by her Spanish-language Journalism students at Newmark. The emerging picture of Spanish-language journalism in the US shows a startling variety of outlets, mostly tiny, shoestring independents, at work throughout the American heartland as well as in longer-established urban centers of Latinx settlement.
Robert G. Mead, Jr., whose memory El Instituto honors through the annual Mead Lecture, would no doubt have recognized Graciela Mochkofsky as a fellow intellectual border-crosser for her ability to transcend languages, borders and the academic/public intellectual divide.
