Oprah Winfrey Show to now be offered in Spanish. Odd article from Huffington Post strongly criticizes the move
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Here's the news that the Oprah Winfrey Show will be offered with Spanish subtitles as well from now on:
Chicago-based Harpo Productions says the show is being made available in Spanish through Secondary Audio Programming and closed captioning.
The Spanish-language offerings launched Monday in the country's six largest Hispanic TV markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston and Dallas. More cities are expected to be added this season.
Harpo is picking up the cost of the translation service in order to boost its Hispanic audience.
"It allows us to serve the fastest growing demographic of the U.S. population," Angela DePaul, a spokeswoman for Harpo Productions Inc.
Makes sense, right? Add subtitles in another language and increase one's viewing audience. A writer on the Huffington Post though seems oddly opposed to the move:
But Oprah's crack market-research team didn't do their homework. The fastest-growing segment of the population is overwhelmingly U.S.- born and fluent in English.
And guess what? Despite the breathless banner ads on Oprah.com exclaiming "Finally! Oprah in Spanish!" the kind of women living in the U.S. who don't speak Spanish are probably not the type who are going to be able to afford the $60 LeMystere bras or $30 Yves Saint Laurent lipsticks that the Queen of Consumerism shills on her show, in her magazine and on her website.
No, that would be me: Young, female, affluent, English-speaking, U.S.-born Latinas.
And Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was also only for the rich? Only secret agents enjoy watching James Bond films? Only people that secretly fight crime at night enjoy watching Batman? There's little sense behind this argument. People love to watch shows about things they can't afford and can't do.
Let's compare: Oprah's 7.4 million daily viewers are overwhelmingly female, white, and over the age of 55, according to MSNBC's Aswini Anburajan. She also reported that Oprah's reach among the Hispanic population is tiny -- only about 230,000.
Right, hence the goal: "in order to boost its Hispanic (here this means Spanish-speaking) audience". There are probably a lot of Spanish dramas that people would also end up watching if there were English subtitles.
Here in Korea as well you can watch the Oprah Winfrey Show on tv with subtitles, and because of that a lot of people know about and like the show now. Before the subtitles were available -- big surprise -- nobody really knew about or watched the show. And that's just for a language like Korean, spoken in one, er two, countries. Spanish is spoken in a few dozen countries outside the United States, people that watch the show in the US will record it and put it on YouTube, that'll be watched by people all over the world, etc., etc. The article criticizes the show on other areas such as its vapid nature and lack of content ("How about having a touchingly emotional segment on racism against Hispanics? Or just flat out making an effort to have any Latino faces in her hyper-estrogenized audience?"), which is fine, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the news about now offering the show with Spanish subtitles. I'm not an Oprah fan either (nor do I dislike her at all), but it would be best to just write about the show itself and not try to draw an odd parallel that offering Spanish subtitles is somehow offensive to any community. The more subtitles available for a show the better, as far as I'm concerned.
4 comments:
Not surprising; there's an odd current of exceptionalism among US-ian latinos -- for some reason, spanish-language media that aren't particularly about latinos are seen as somehow treacherous or suspect. I don't pretend to having enough information to hypothesize, but my Spanish-speaking wife (of Spanish descent) runs into it all the time. Oddly enough more with Mexicans than other Spanish-speakers, but this could just be a sampling issue.
What's the deal that Hispanics can't afford stuff? Tell that to the people who rennovated Gulfgate Mall in Houston. The csnsus data looked bad, but the investors looked at other data and determined that there was much money to be made on the near Southeast side. They looked at the number of cellphone accounts and the fact that Milby HS performs well above other schools with similar demographics and convinced Charles Butt of HEB fame (yall from Texas know who Ima talkin bout) to spend a few million to open up a Wal-Mart scale superstore to anchor the new project. Gulfgate has boomed. Its investors have made millions.
Gulfgate shoppers are the perfect Oprah audience and the kids can learn English while mom watches the subtitles.
My Spanish is terrible, and I'm the number one go to guy to speak Spanish at work. I listen to the parents speak Spanish and I understand most of what they say, but I cannot form a good response fast enough in Spanish. I tell the kids the answer in English and they translate. I don't need the kids to go from Spanish to English, but I need them the other way around. Que lastima!
What's the deal that Hispanics can't afford stuff? Tell that to the people who rennovated Gulfgate Mall in Houston. The csnsus data looked bad, but the investors looked at other data and determined that there was much money to be made on the near Southeast side. They looked at the number of cellphone accounts and the fact that Milby HS performs well above other schools with similar demographics and convinced Charles Butt of HEB fame (yall from Texas know who Ima talkin bout) to spend a few million to open up a Wal-Mart scale superstore to anchor the new project. Gulfgate has boomed. Its investors have made millions.
Gulfgate shoppers are the perfect Oprah audience and the kids can learn English while mom watches the subtitles.
My Spanish is terrible, and I'm the number one go to guy to speak Spanish at work. I listen to the parents speak Spanish and I understand most of what they say, but I cannot form a good response fast enough in Spanish. I tell the kids the answer in English and they translate. I don't need the kids to go from Spanish to English, but I need them the other way around. Que lastima!
Not surprising; there's an odd current of exceptionalism among US-ian latinos -- for some reason, spanish-language media that aren't particularly about latinos are seen as somehow treacherous or suspect. I don't pretend to having enough information to hypothesize, but my Spanish-speaking wife (of Spanish descent) runs into it all the time. Oddly enough more with Mexicans than other Spanish-speakers, but this could just be a sampling issue.
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