COMMENTARY : TELEVISION THIS BAD IS REALLY A SIN

Imagine turning on your TV set and having it go berserk. During prime time at 7 you get the equivalent of “Dynasty” seven days a week followed by a Mexican “Dallas” at 8 five days a week. Then at 9, you’re offered more soap, perhaps the equivalent of “Falcon Crest”--also five times a week. By 10, the programming may ease up with a comedy or a variety show at best, or a half hour of something resembling “Knots Landing” at worst. Your viewing day concludes with a government-biased foreign newscast at 11. Sweet dreams.

Sound like a “Twilight Zone”?

For millions of Latinos in this country, it’s the daily dose of reality, courtesy of the Spanish International Network.

If you’re an English- and Spanish-speaking resident, you can flip the channel. But if you’re a monolingual Spanish speaker, you’re stuck.

Like anybody else, Latinos depend on the immediacy of TV to keep informed or entertained. Yet, as big as their numbers are in the United States--about 20 million, with 2.5 million here--all they’ve got is SIN-style TV, love it or leave it.

Compared to other cities, Latinos in Los Angeles are “lucky” when it comes to Spanish-language TV. Not only do they have the option of tuning in local SIN affiliate KMEX Channel 34, but they also can switch to local Spanish-language KVEA Channel 52. But it, too, is filled with sudsers or American movies dubbed in Spanish.

“We’re the only game in town!” is the way SIN programming director Rosita Peru assessed the situation in a Variety trade paper article last year. And while SIN has made some progress (its commercials often rival its English-language counterparts in technical competence), the programming remains banal.

Yet Peru’s cocky attitude has its grounding in the fact that SIN’s sales have soared from $4.3 million in 1972 to $60 million last year. Some of this growth is due to the large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants, not because of anything SIN has done to improve programming to accommodate these new residents’ needs.

In a poll of the Los Angeles Latino community earlier this year, La Opinion TV Editor Ofelia de la Torre found that some newly arrived Latinos prefer to watch American TV--despite the language difference--instead of SIN’s offerings. Of those watching SIN-affiliated stations, prime-time novelas , or soaps, are preferred by housewives by almost 5-to-1, according to SIN-supplied statistics. As for the rest of the family, it’s apparent that most Latin males aren’t staying at home to watch the soaps night after night, and the children, who are learning English as a second language in local schools, would rather watch Mr. T or school-recommended programs like PBS’ Wonderworks’ recent “Marisela.”

SIN this year has gone through a flurry of oftentimes confusing program changes without actually changing much of anything. One exception was the revamping of “Mundo Latino” into a “Today”-style news program, expanded from one to 2 1/2 hours.

Yet children’s educational programming remains almost nonexistent. For example, during the prime-time, it’s been difficult for parents to shield children from the popular “Cristal”--a tawdry novela that ended in June with the heroine, who had a child out of wedlock, getting married in white, while her father, a Catholic priest who never married Cristal’s mother, officiated.

Since adultery and incest played major roles seven days a week, it seemed like it was more than a coincidence that during the commercial breaks, a local abortion clinic offered quick service and monthly payments.

At present, “Chiquilladas” is the only SIN program that is geared to children and adults, but it is only offered on Saturday afternoons. Yet it is a joy to watch its young and inventive cast of Mexican children perform some delightful skits a la the Little Rascals. And one boy in particular, Carlitos Espejel, is a budding Cantinflas.

SIN’s best program is its national newscast “Noticero SIN” (6:30 p.m. Monday-Friday locally), despite its occasional Cuban-American anti-communist bias, the result of SIN’s centralized operations in heavily Cuban Miami. But this bias is a mere peccadillo when compared to other 2 1/2 hours of weekday news programs broadcast by SIN: the Mexico City-based “Hoy Mismo” in the mornings and “24 Horas” in the evenings.

Both programs have been guilty of censoring news or only presenting the “official” PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico’s ruling political party) version of events. For example, a March demonstration against the PRI by people still homeless from the recent major earthquake was covered by the U.S. networks but not by SIN or Televisa, Mexico’s only commercial TV network. Ditto the recent charges of election fraud in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

To make matters worse, there is no weekend SIN or KMEX news program. It’s as if the world had disappeared and Latinos can wait until manana to find out what is happening. But never fear, on weekends SIN gives the viewer more novelas and four hours of the almost unbearable “Siempre en Domingo,” an Ed Sullivan-style variety show, which has lost much of its folkloric charm by emulating American TV.

SIN’s press releases crow that almost 40% of its programming is produced in the United States. But officials would be hard pressed to prove it. A scan through programming on a typical weekday reveals that less than 20% is U.S.-produced.

And little of that programming, much less that originating in Mexico City, has any direct appeal to the Mexican-American audience that has developed its own style and sensibilities. You won’t find “Zoot Suit” or American Playhouse’s “Seguin” on SIN.

It is increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that while the Mexican-American audience is the largest subgroup of Latinos in the United States, SIN’s programming virtually ignores it. Yet SIN is the first to use figures of the total Latino audience when it comes to promoting itself to its advertisers. Even in the Los Angeles market, where Mexican-Americans vastly outnumber other Latinos, the amount of locally produced programming by KMEX is abysmal--only a half-hour weekday newscast at 6 p.m. and several news breaks. “Ahora en L.A.,” an afternoon community bulletin board, was axed to pave the way for--what else?--almost nonstop novelas from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. daily.

Thus KMEX directs only about one hour of its 20-hour weekday schedule to local programming and very little on the weekends. This kind of community service flies in the face of what some Latino groups are contending--that their community would suffer if a syndicate headed by Hallmark Cards Corp. were to take control of the station, a purchase that is pending before the Federal Communications Commission. The groups say that Hallmark et al., would have little empathy with the Latino community. Well, basically, neither do the present owners of KMEX when it comes to serving their audience. (About 80% of Spanish-language TV viewers watch KMEX, according to Arbitron figures.)

Any American living in Mexico City doesn’t have the problem transplanted Mexicans face here when it comes to programming. A cable service in the Mexican capital beams U.S. networks plus PBS, ESPN, movies, videos, etc. One wonders why SIN doesn’t do the same in reverse, via its own Galavision, a national Spanish-language pay-cable service, that could easily buy cultural programming from Televisa, which is also owned by SIN owner Emilio Azcarraga. Such a move might make Galavision more attractive to a wider U.S. Latino audience.

But as it stands, Galavision--with estimated 145,000 subscribers, which is considered low--has failed. The average Latino household can’t afford it, and those who can prefer a premium service like HBO instead of one that barely broadcasts 12 hours on weekdays. Although Galavision officials claim to be finally running in the black this year, it nevertheless must have been a terrific tax write-off for parent SIN Inc. and Azcarraga in all the preceding years.

Another facet of SIN’s programming that seems peculiar is the daily “Jimmy Swaggart Ministry,” whose Christian fundamentalism must be anathema to predominately Catholic Latinos. When asked why Swaggart was on its schedule, SIN officials retorted: “Because we buy it.”

In lieu of Swaggart, it might behoove SIN to air a badly needed beginning English-language course daily. Currently, only “Sigueme/Follow Me,” a BBC English course, airs at 7 a.m. on Saturdays. But SIN should develop its own program since the British series includes instructions on how to say such clinkers as “I’m going on holiday to Sheffield!”

And while SIN has spent the better part of this year engaged in its own corporate novela (Azcarraga was ordered to divest himself of ownership in KMEX and eight other U.S. Spanish-language TV stations), no one seems to be minding SIN’s programming store.

It may be this failure to heed its audience’s complaints and not the FCC brouhaha that proves to be the straw that breaks SIN’s dominance on the Latino market in the United States.