Sorry, J.Lo, A-Rod and all you other Latino A-listers. The second American Latino TV Awards won’t be honoring you this year.

Instead, this alternative award takes an offbeat approach to doling out accolades by focusing on underground talents who have yet to explode in the mainstream.

“We want to recognize people who are not normally recognized - good people doing good things who, like us to some degree, are toiling away in obscurity,” says Robert Rose, executive producer for the American Latino TV Awards.

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A government report on broadcast media ownership released Friday concludes that television stations broadcasting in specific markets tend to offer more local news for those areas than the national networks.

“With cable and satellite service, the public can receive programming from nationwide outlets, such as CNN and FOX News, and television stations in adjacent markets,” concludes the Government and Accountability Office’s (GAO) new study. “However, media outlets located in a market are more likely to provide local news, public affairs, and political programming addressing the needs of residents in that market, such as coverage of local political campaigns, compared to nationwide and adjacent-market outlets.”

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Xerox Corp. and representatives of current and former black sales representatives have settled a class-action lawsuit accusing the office-equipment manufacturer of racial discrimination.

The settlement would require Xerox to pay $12 million to 1,100 former and current employees and includes legal fees, said Diane Bradley, a lawyer who represented the employees.

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The historic presidential campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have injected issues of race and gender into politics as never before. With campaign coverage center stage on the cable channels, producers and critics are again assessing the diversity among pundits, who talk at length about things like Obama’s pastor, the Hispanic vote, Iraq and the economy.

MSNBC and CNN this election season have given new prominence to a handful of contributing commentators from varied backgrounds and perspectives: blacks, Hispanics and women. Whether such moves signal real progress in diversifying the pundit lineup or merely reflect the needs of a particular news cycle is the question, some media experts say.

The most prominent positions on television remain overwhelmingly with white male viewers, and some critics note how striking that non-inclusion can seem during this election year.

“Whatever progress has been made with contributors and commentators as of late, the cable networks have a long way to go before they look like the American people,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group. He added that white men were the hosts of all the major Sunday- morning talk shows, the major primetime cable news programs and — except for Katie Couric, a relative newcomer — the network evening news broadcasts.

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Wells Fargo, Minnesota’s second-largest employer, holds the title of the largest financial institution in the state. The banking giant has what it calls banking stores (180 in Minnesota), mortgage stores and financial stores dotting every area of the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But Wells Fargo also holds another title: the institution most likely to target minorities with high-cost (subprime) loans, regardless of income.

In fact, in a multi-state study last year by a variety of nonpartisan organizations, data indicated that Wells Fargo was 10 times more likely to sell a high-cost loan to African-American borrowers than whites. In Chicago, the city to suffer from the biggest racial disparities, 35 percent of African-Americans received high-cost loans (again, regardless of income) versus only 2.5 percent of whites. And how did the nefarious Countrywide Financial fare in this study? That financial institution had an African-American/white disparity ratio of 4.9, or half of that of Wells Fargo.

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Sandra Romero and Bibiana Vega do their best to shrug off taunts from fellow Latino classmates at Del Mar High School in San Jose.

The 17-year-old seniors are called “whitewashed.” Mataditas - dorks. Cerebritas - brainiacs. They’re told they’re “losing their culture” - just because Sandra has a 4.0 grade-point average and Bibiana has a 3.5.

The put-downs are clear: Smart is not cool.

And too many Latino students are choosing cool over school.

But a few miles away at Hyde Middle School, in the heavily Asian Cupertino Union School District, Tiffany Nguyen detects the opposite attitude. If you’re not smart, “you’re really looked down on,” said the Vietnamese-American eighth-grader.

After years of tiptoeing around racial issues for fear of invoking stereotypes, California educators are now looking squarely at how ethnicity and culture shape achievement and attitudes toward school.

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Exclude the Hispanic-American market and you make a huge blunder. Americans of Hispanic descent now spend so much that their buying power is estimated to reach US$1.2 trillion by 2011. Reaching the potent Hispanic-American market is one of the issues under discussion at the Caribbean Media Exchange on Sustainable Tourism (CMEx).

How potent is this market? Organisers of the Counterpart International-produced CMEx, to be held May 15 to 19 at the Holiday Inn San Juan on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, say that in just three years’ time, nearly one out of every six residents in the United States is expected be of Hispanic origin.

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Sen. Barack Obama’s historic speech earlier this month in Philadelphia on race relations has elevated the discussion about the issue to the point where it has worked itself into the pews and pulpits of Bay Area churches.

Local ministers say they gave sermons about it on Easter, the holiest day of the year for Christians, and others plan to do so in the future.

These ministers - Pentecostals, Episcopalians and Baptists, Republican and Democrat, white, black and Asian - say Obama’s honesty offers a steppingstone to wade into the volatile waters of race relations.

They said his speech, which called for an honest dialogue about race, offered an opportunity to be open to others’ experiences without automatically triggering the shame, guilt and strife such conversations usually entail.

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In a profile of America’s Catholic population, released in advance of Pope Benedict’s visit to the US, the Pew Forum calls attention to a demographic shift, with younger Catholics less likely to remain active in the Church, while Hispanic immigrants replace many of the “cradle Catholics” who no longer practice the faith. “No other major faith in the U.S. has experienced greater net losses over the last few decades as a result of changes in religious affiliation than the Catholic Church,” the Pew report notes. Citing the extensive survey undertaken for the “Religious Landscape Survey” that was released earlier this month, the Pew Forum explains that “roughly one-third of those who were raised Catholic have left the church, and approximately one-in-ten American adults are former Catholics.”

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Educators gathered for the workshop on promoting faculty diversity at the National Education Association: American Federation of Teachers (NEA-AFT) conference held in Washington last week, heard from higher education officials about not only achieving a racially diverse faculty, but achieving a diversity, which also includes women and people with disabilities.

Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), said historically Black colleges and universities have a successful model to achieve a diverse professoriate.

Close to 48 percent of HBCU faculty come from diverse racial backgrounds, said Baskerville, adding that approximately 52 percent of the faculty at HBCUs are Black, 33 percent are White, 7 percent are Asian American and 3 percent are Hispanic.

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