Honestly, having seen the clip (below) from George Lopez using the word palpable incorrectly (instead of palatable) and complaining about flat bread (he thinks it’s a new thing rather than an ancient old-world delight), I expected a fluff piece full of interviews with the Latino Elite–you know the usual suspects such as Eva Longoria and Jimmy Smitts who are at all the cool events including the Alma Awards and most recently Fiesta at the White House. They’re in there, but the first half of the two part-series focused mostly on issues plaguing Latinos in America.  They touched on immigration, racism (sort of), education, and even mental health.  In fact the piece was so depressing, it left me wishing they had done a fluff piece after all .  Instead of going to bed feeling positive and super-Latino-centric, I couldn’t keep Pico Rivera and the Garcia girls out of my dreams.  One Garcia girl couldn’t manage to graduate high school partly because of her teen pregnancy and partly because of her monolingual mother who kept dragging her out of class to translate for her.  The other Garcia girl tried to commit suicide at age 11 and also ended up a teen mom.

In short, I expected this:

Instead, I got some of this:

I did enjoy the segment on the Dominican family dealing with race and cultural issues in North Carolina.  I also was happy that they filmed at Garfield High School in East LA, as my Dad is an alumnus.  But I had hoped that a major media outlet would say something–anything–about the media.

While I did not expect CNN to mention that Lou Dobbs is one of the most vociferous purveyor of lies and hate toward Latinos (heck, CNN refused to let Dobbs’ critics run an ad during the show), I did expect some mention of the media’s role in the ongoing oppression of the Latino community.  Perhaps in their world, merely doing a segment about Latinos is enough to balance out the negative attacks on us, as if reminding us that Latinos are dropping out of school, having babies at a young age, and happen to like food and dancing, might counter the vile crap being spewed by Dobbs, Glenn Beck, and others of their ilk.  Soledad O’Brien is in a unique position to call out her own colleagues (as Rachel Maddow has done regarding the vilification of Acorn).  At this point, the media’s lack of social responsibility is the elephant on the airwaves that CNN has chosen to ignore.  Let’s see if they say something about it tonight.  I’ll cross my fingers but I won’t hold my breath.