In a media content analysis of news stories published and produced in 2009 the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Hispanic Center find that the Hispanic population remains barely represented in major media.
As the Hispanic population grows so has its importance in larger public dialogues but official coverage has lacked meaningful content concerning the lives of Hispanic Americans. Rather existing coverage (involving Hispanic individuals/groups) has been almost exclusively "event driven". The debates around the Sonia Sotomayor, the Mexican drug war, the H1NI outbreak and immigration have become the central, and often only, narratives.
Rapidly changing demographics in the US have opened the door to what could be a fascinating dialogue around what is already happening in American communities, what is already being seen in schools and how immigrant individuals and communities are creating and building on narratives in the US. But buried under a mass of disjointed headlines, the public narrative around Hispanic Americans remains largely incoherent.
