At a time when few Latinos labored in broadcast information, Bob Navarro turned a information author in Los Angeles at KNXT-TV Channel 2 on “The Big News.”
The yr was 1967 and, as Navarro recalled a long time later, “When I first came to ‘The Big News,’ there was a woman reporter, a woman writer, no woman on the desk, no woman producer. That was it. There was an African American, but no Chicanos. I was the first one.”
Navarro later turned an on-screen reporter, considered one of a handful of Latino reporters showing on Southern California airwaves within the Seventies.
Navarro, who was honored with a army service on the Los Angeles Nationwide Cemetery Columbarium on Sept. 12, is being keep in mind by former colleagues as a barrier breaker who pushed for insightful, stereotype-free protection of the Latino group. He died in North Hollywood on Aug. 21 on the age of 92.
“Bob was always one of the friendliest and nicest guys in the news business, a business in which he experienced racism and intolerance,” stated Joe Saltzman, a professor of journalism and communication at USC. “But through it all, he never lost his smile, his sense of who he was.”
Born Robert Navarro on March 15, 1932, in El Paso, he grew up in South Los Angeles however didn’t full highschool. He served within the Military earlier than attending broadcasting college in Los Angeles, in response to Félix Gutiérrez, a professor emeritus of journalism at USC. Navarro’s profession took him to Las Vegas and later to the information author job at KNXT-TV Channel 2, now generally known as CBS Los Angeles.
“His claim to fame was the quality of his work and his dedication to journalism,” stated Gutiérrez.
He turned acquainted to 1000’s of Angelenos by internet hosting a weekly interview along with his personal title within the title, “Bob Navarro’s Journal.”
He touched on all types of matters on the present, however an episode in 1997 captured his presence — a composed, bespectacled reporter in a crisp grey swimsuit asking piercing questions. Leaping into the hot-button problem on the time, he guided a tense dialog with individuals providing differing views of Proposition 227, a statewide measure that restricted bilingual schooling in California.
The dialogue was emblematic of the in-depth and hard discussions that appeared on his present.
Away from work, Gutiérrez famous, Navarro inspired aspiring journalists to make alternatives for themselves and notice their potential.
Navarro was one of many founding members of the California Chicano Information Media Assn., a corporation created in 1972 that advocates for range in journalism and correct portrayals of the Latino group. It was a very fraught time for Latinos, who confronted racism within the wrestle for equal illustration.
“We weren’t integrated throughout, nor was our language, nor was our culture,” Gutiérrez recalled. Navarro’s stints at broadcast tv stations — which included KPIX in San Francisco and Southern California’s KCET, KTLA, KCAL and KNBC — made strides to vary that narrative.
Navarro made the swap to Spanish-language networks when Frank Cruz employed him in 1986 as information director of KVEA-TV, a present Telemundo outlet.
Cruz, a co-creator of Telemundo and Navarro’s shut good friend, stated the journalist “led the charge” on bringing tales to Spanish-speaking audiences that precisely mirrored their every day lives. In his protection, Navarro rejected notions that Latinos had been a monolithic group.
“We’ve got to do in-depth coverage stories on the Latino community and all aspects of it,” Cruz stated. “We didn’t want to do stereotypical stories.”
Navarro’s close to four-decade-long tenure in journalism included protection of the Chicano Moratorium, which culminated in an August 1970 march that drew as much as 30,000 demonstrators. He recalled seeing the “bloody remains” of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a tear gasoline projectile fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy on the Silver Greenback Bar that day.
Navarro didn’t return to the Silver Greenback Bar till 20 years later, writing in The Instances that he had lengthy struggled to just accept Salazar’s dying.
“It took an act of denial to make me go in,” he wrote in regards to the locale, “and it took an act of God to keep me there. Time and again my eyes would slide over to that spot on the floor where the beacon came crashing down.”
Navarro left reporting within the early Nineteen Nineties to take up a place as KCBS’ director of editorials. Variety in newsrooms had come a great distance from when he started, however even then, Navarro remarked that underrepresented teams wanted to have a seat on the desk in management positions.
He inspired his pals who taught journalism to push their college students to try for high quality journalism and discover the tales “no one tells about people that look like me,” in response to Saltzman.
“I wish Bob could visit my USC classes today so he could see how diverse they are with faces that not only look like his but look like so many other cultures,” Saltzman stated. “It would have brought one of those patented Navarro smiles to his face.”
Navarro was preceded in dying by his spouse, Carmel.
