Should American Journalism Make Us Americans?

Abstract

One such innovation is illustrated in the recent history of the Miami Herald and its parent company, Knight-Ridder. They have reshaped the paper to reach millions of residents of the city for whom the language, the political culture, and the common guiding principles of local journalism and politics are to some degree foreign and uncomfortable—at least too uncomfortable for many of them to have bought the paper and supported its advertisers when it was in English. For the growing population of former Cubans and Latin Americans in the city, now the news from the Herald comes in Spanish, and often with a partisanship and effusiveness that American reporters get wrung out of them within two months of their first job. For Knight Ridder, it seemed to be a reasonable step toward getting the paper back in the black while serving the diversity of its potential readership. But for Jim Sleeper, it signifies a profound and, one surmises, terrible change (even though the mitosis of the Miami Herald has achieved neither financial nor editorial success by most measures). El Nuevo Herald in this essay seems to stand as the first block of an American Tower of Babel, an innovation that will result in a polyglot chaos brought on by worship to the false idol of consumer marketing.