“The Spanish-speaking community in the United States is especially vulnerable [of falling for fake news],” explains Tamoa Calzadilla, a Venezuelan journalist and one of the founders of Factchequeado — a platform that tracks the misinformation that most affects Spanish speakers. The organization is fighting back against the toxic media that’s poisoning America, a country that’s a desert of information when it comes to Spanish.
Hispanic citizens represent almost 20% of the U.S. population, “but they’re orphaned by news in their language,” Calzadilla notes. Quality journalism in Spanish is a very scarce commodity and barely has funding. “Translations from English are usually of poor quality… they don’t take into account the way in which Latinos express themselves. And the sections aimed at them are the first to be eliminated when the media suffers from budget cuts,” she explains.
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My partner is Spanish. Most of the news her family (from Spain) shares is fake as hell.
Spain has a public TV, that is relatively neutral and mostly free of fake news (except on Dec 28, that’s the April Fools day for Spain), but some find it too “bland”. Then a bunch of regional TVs that spin everything each its own way, a “catholic” one, and some private nationwide TVs that live from “engagement” (aka: controversy). Plus the usual share of scam filled tele-shops, fortune readers, casinos and similar.
As for newspapers, with their digital editions, there is no neutral one. Right, Left, Sports, Market analyst BS, all flavors of regional nationalisms, a bunch of “engagement” based ones, down to content mills, and random scammers. Pretty much any “shareable” piece of news, either has a heavy slant, or is BS. That’s when it isn’t directly fabricated as a “meme”.
Without digging deeper, I’d only consider anything shared from RTVE… but that’s usually too boring and lacks the “wow” factor to get shared in the first place.
This sounds precise. My partner’s family is ultra conservative. Nothing they share is bland. It is all sensational, end-of-the-world level stuff: the immigrants are coming, the government is controlled by Illuminati, “they” gave us COVID and are making us eat insects while “they” eat like kings, economic collapse is just around the corner…
Not a thing on climate change, though…