Local radio station WORT 89.9 FM announced Friday that its coverage of Election Night 2004 will be broadcast in both Spanish and English. The live transmission will begin at 8 p.m. tonight and consist of ballot return updates, election analyses and in-studio commentators, according to a WORT-FM press release.
\We'll do national headlines at the top of the hour in English, headlines and returns, and then we'll go to five minutes of Spanish,"" said WORT-FM News and Public Affairs Facilitator Nathan Moore. ""There will also be some features and some commentaries, some guest commentators ... we'll basically just switch back and forth.""
Though the 2002 midterm elections were reported in both English and Spanish, this is the first presidential election the radio station will cover bilingually. This January will mark the two-year anniversary of the station's Spanish-language news hour, ""En Nuestro Patio,"" the only show of its kind produced in Wisconsin.
According to Moore, UW-Madison students constitute a portion of the WORT-FM listeners, including those who tune in to the Spanish-language programming.
""I hear a lot of students that say they like to tune in ... I mean, [students] aren't always a majority [of our listeners], but it's always a good number that know and listen,"" Moore said. ""[Then there's] a whole pool of folks that are into the news and that speak Spanish. A number of them are students, although a lot of them are not.""
The hope is that the radio coverage will help bilingual students and community members synthesize election information, especially those whose first language is Spanish. Angelina Orozco, contact for the UW-Madison student organization La Colectiva, warned that the latter group was the one in danger of being affected in the election by their language barriers.
""If you're bilingual, that means you know English, so I don't know if knowing Spanish really hinders the election. But if you're not [bilingual], if you're mostly of a foreign language, then I think for everybody that's a problem,"" Orozco said.
The move toward bilingualism in local media such as WORT-FM can be seen as representative of the shifting demographics of both the UW-Madison and the United States. According to Moore, WORT-FM's Spanish-language programming is partially a response to population trends, but it is more an issue of equal representation.
""It's partly the demographic,"" Moore said. ""But a big part of [our bilingual shows] come from our mission statement, which is to reach out to communities that are often underrepresented in other media.""
