BrainTrust Query: What lessons can marketers take away from PBS' 'war' with Hispanics?
"History is written by the victors," said Winston Churchill. Well, the victors this week are Hispanics, who just won a war waged against PBS to get their side of the World War II story told.
The war was over "The War," a high-profile documentary about, yes, the big one, and filmmaker Ken Burn's inadvertent omission of Latinos from the 14-hour documentary. In an unprecedented move, the demands of activists are pre-empting artistic vision, forcing Burns to go back into the editing room months before his documentary is seen by the public.
The fuss started when a project manager from a University of Texas sponsored project, US Latinos and Latinas and World War II, asked Ken Burns if Latino veterans were included among the more than 40 men and women who were interviewed for the documentary. When Burns replied that there were none, the project's boss, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez spearheaded the Defend the Honor Campaign to force PBS to add a Hispanic perspective.
PBS resisted, citing the special consideration given to Japanese Americans and African Americans, and that they couldn't include every group's experience. In a statement, Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick wrote, "We are dismayed and saddened by any assumption that we intentionally excluded anyone from our series on the Second World War. ... In this latest project, we have attempted to show the universal human experience of war by focusing on the testimonies of just a handful of people - mostly from four American towns. As a result, millions of stories are not explored in our film."
Rivas-Rodriguez was unrelenting and her grass roots initiative enlisted the support of groups such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the National Institute for Latino Policy and even the House Hispanic Caucus. "Our people weren't valued," she said. "Not only were they not valued then, they are not being valued today."
PBS CEO Paula Kerger met with a group of Hispanic leaders, including Rivas-Rodriguez on March 6, but the network's resolve continued. In a letter to the attendees a few weeks later, Kerger touted PBS' commitment to reflect the Hispanic population in programs such as Maya and Miguel, Los Niños en Su Casa and the new V-me national Spanish language network that features the best of public television.
The battle ended this week when PBS announced that Burns will produce an addendum, of sorts, to the series about the contributions of Hispanics to the war effort. They also said that a Hispanic producer will be hired to help with the content.
Discussion Questions: Did Ken Burns err in not including a Hispanic perspective in his documentary? Was PBS wrong to give in? What lessons are there here for consumer marketers attempting to deal with the intricacies of ethnic politics?
I don't think that any American would begrudge Hispanic veterans in any war from receiving their rightful honors. By most accounts, there were between 250,000 and 500,000 of them who served in the armed forces during World War II. This represents a range of 2.5 to 5 percent of all who served.
Why the imprecision? Because Hispanics during that time were officially classified as "white" so no numbers were kept. To be precise, the Census tracked "Mexicans" as a distinct race in 1930 for the first time, but this was abolished in 1940 when the Census eliminated Mexicans as a racial category and began counting people of "Spanish Mother Tongue" - there were 1.9 million that year. It wasn't until 1970 that the Census Bureau made any serious attempt to estimate the number of Hispanics.
So during World War II, Hispanics were allowed to hold U.S. citizenship, marry non-Hispanic whites (unlike Blacks and Asians) and, more importantly, serve in all-white units. Japanese American men fought while their families were in internment camps; African Americans fought in segregated units like the Tuskeegee Airmen; Navajo "Code Talkers" gave the U.S. a code that was unbreakable. All these groups, including Hispanics, returned to face discrimination at home.
Hispanic veterans, like all American heroes, deserve to have their story told. The lesson here is that, presently, there are 44 million Hispanics. And their numbers mean that their stories will be told - in the history books and in the marketing books. And since Hispanics make up 10.4 percent of PBS' viewing audience, the network's decision was as much about their own desire to speak to Hispanics as it was about the insistence by Hispanics on being spoken to.