Fox News Can’t Decide Whether to Love or Hate Latinos

This week Media Matters looked at the dichotomy of the coverage on both Fox News and Fox News Latino when they reported news that the family of a Mexican teenager who was shot and killed by a border patrol agent for allegedly throwing rocks at them is filing a wrongful death suit.

Media Matters’ Simon Maloy points out that Fox News Latino reported news of the lawsuit in a “straightforward manner,” but on Fox News the tone was much more incendiary:

Yesterday on Fox News’ Happening Now, anchor Jon Scott conducted an interview with the slain teenager’s family’s attorney. In introducing the combative segment, Scott referred to undocumented immigrants simply as “illegals” — a dehumanizing shorthand frequently encountered on the network — and aired several grainy video clips of rocks being thrown at the U.S./Mexico border. Remember, the family attorney denies the claim that the boy threw rocks and that the video of the shooting corroborates this. But Fox News aired other video clips of other people throwing rocks at the border.

It seems like the “conflict” Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said wouldn’t occur has manifested itself. Their solution to avoid conflict may just be that Fox News Latino not cover all the news Fox News covers; current top news stories on Fox News Latino includes stories about childhood obesity, pop singers being arrested, physic octopus and political prisoners in Cuba, none of which are present on Fox News. The big lesson here? You just can’t have it both ways.

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