Journal 3: Reality and Complexity.

Every person is complex and unique. It is important to understand that, even though, the voting behavior is different from one human being to another those differences are not completely reflected in the voting polls. Race and ethnicity are factors that influence our ideas and principles.
“Like so many of the labels that crop up each year to describe the voting behavior of groups, those two are mostly stereotypes masquerading as information. Too often, journalists use the phrases without ever thinking about what they're actually saying or what the consequences might be of that kind of political lumping,” Keith Woods wrote in his article “A Vote for Complexity: Handling Race in Political Coverage.”
The two groups that Woods was referring to were the black and the Latino vote. I believe that journalism in many cases report the voting behavior using stereotypes in order to describe common ideals and concerns that certain community have. It is truth that not everybody on a certain community is going to vote for the same candidate or that they going to decide their political inclinations only based on racial and ethnic profiling; however, our crude reality is that, as professor Reisner said, we have to make an enormous effort to not vote for the candidate that is related to us. We tend to put our faith on a candidate mostly based on racial and social similarities that create patterns within communities and groups, and that is why those stereotypes and labels exist.
In the last presidential race the majority of the black community vote for Obama, the younger vote was also directed to the same candidate and those groups determined the results of the political race. The Latino vote also favored Obama. That certain groups have a common voting intention is an avoidable fact; nevertheless, political coverage should be more complex and profound. There are different motivations that drive voting ideals and journalists must be aware of them.
A journalist must be aware of the cultural, social and racial divisions, but also must be aware of the subdivision and the divisions within the subdivisions. For example, the Hispanic community differs incredibly depending of the country of origin and the socio-economic factors. A Venezuelan- American may have different ideological opinions than a Cuban- American.
A journalist should cover a community as a group of individuals and not as an indistinctive mass. A journalist should look for more profound differences that in many cases are far more complex than race and ethnicity issues.