There wouldn’t be an advertising industry if people weren’t susceptible to messages.  POM Wonderful wouldn’t rent billboards promising (falsely) to prevent prostate cancer, the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t spend millions on spots claiming (falsely) to produce clean energy, candidates wouldn’t fork over billions of dollars to local TV stations for (pants-on-fire) political ads if all their money could buy were some wispy correlation.

They’re folding like cheap card tables. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen the demise of NBCLatino.com, an English-language website for Latinos, as well as CNN Latino, Time Warner’s year-long effort to create programming for the U.S. Hispanic market. Now come rumors that Poder, Televisa’s magazine providing “Intelligence for the Business Elite,” may cease publication. Hold on, amigo. Isn’t the Latino market growing in demographic leaps and bounds? Don’t we have a zillion dollars in purchasing power? Didn’t we decide the election? One would think that Latino media should be thriving. 

It’s important to celebrate whenever social barriers are knocked down — including the one that fell this week when Mignon Clyburn became the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. Never before has a president appointed a woman to chair the commission — not even on an interim basis. It’s not the first time Clyburn has made history. She’s also the first African-American woman to serve as an FCC commissioner. 

: In early April the Associated Press announced that it would no longer use the word “illegal” when referring to undocumented immigrants. The decision has been hailed by immigrant rights groups and others, who say the term is a pejorative that dehumanizes large swaths of the U.S. population, immigrant and native-born alike. Authors Andrew Lam, Helen Zia and Chitra Divakaruni offer their own views on the term “illegal” through the lens of the immigrant experience.