James Campbell, the Chronicle‘s reader representative, has an odd column today in which he basically attributes racist/nativist motives to those who question why the city’s only English-language daily insists on taking up valuable sports-page real estate by duplicating stories in Spanish:
The phone calls and e-mails are predictable. They come in bunches every time we publish a story in Spanish. In recent weeks, I’ve received dozens of calls and e-mails decrying in vitriolic terms the Chronicle’s publishing a daily World Cup page in Spanish.
One doesn’t have to scratch far beyond the surface to know that the complaints are more about the contentious illegal immigration debate in this country than about Spanish in the Chronicle. The page of Spanish is but a convenient reason to complain, like voicemail that instructs the caller to “press one for English” and “two for Spanish.”
“Why do you print sport pages in Spanish?” an e-mailer wrote. “If you are in this country legally you understand English. By printing anything in Spanish you are pandering to the illegals who refuse to learn English. ENGLISH ONLY, PLEASE. … “
We consider and take seriously all complaints, comments and observations about the editorial content of the newspaper. Protest about stories published in Spanish, however, is a particularly sensitive matter because it goes to where people are politically and culturally.
I’m sure that some of the people who wrote to Mr. Campbell are racist/nativist types, but it’s also not that hard to figure out that Spanish-language content in the only English-language metro daily displaces English-language content, thereby making the paper of less value to English-language readers. Maybe that’s a smart business decision for Hearst (which already puts out a Spanish-language weekly product). Maybe it’s not. But for the newspaper’s reader representative to paint people who might criticize the decision as racists/nativists seems like a stretch. Not to mention intolerant.
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