Covering a Notorious Crime in Spanish: Fascination, and a Different Angle

By ANNIE CORREAL

Published: March 8, 2008

As the crowd shuffles out of the Brooklyn courtroom where Cesar Rodriguez is being tried in the killing of his stepdaughter, a small group of reporters gathers around his lawyers.

The Spanish-language media in New York have followed the Nixzmary Brown case closely, partly because the family is Hispanic.

“If he didn’t do it, then who did?” asks Wanda Silva, a reporter for WXTV, Channel 41, the Univision Spanish-language television station in New York.

“It was her mother,” says one of the lawyers, Barry Deonarine, using his school-learned Spanish to field questions from Spanish-language reporters.

The killing of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown in January 2006 and the trial of Mr. Rodriguez have attracted intense coverage in the English-language press. And they have received at least as much, if not more, attention in the Spanish-language news media. Nixzmary’s family is Hispanic.

Like their English-language counterparts, the Spanish-language media have recounted the emotional trial testimony and the grim details of the abuse inflicted on Nixzmary before she died. And they have chronicled the efforts by Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers to shift blame for the girl’s death onto her mother, Nixzaliz Santiago. Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Santiago, who will be tried separately, are both charged with second-degree murder.

But there are subtle yet clear differences in the tone and the themes in the coverage.

While the English-language tabloids have tended to demonize Mr. Rodriguez, the Spanish-language news media have been somewhat more sympathetic, noting the challenges he faced in trying to provide for and discipline six children.

And in articles, reader comments on newspaper Web sites and television segments, Ms. Santiago has been castigated for what some view as failing in her fundamental responsibility as a mother to keep her daughter safe.

“The worst thing is that the repellent behavior of Rodriguez depended on the complicity of the little one’s mother, who turned a blind eye toward the constant and daily abuse of her daughter until the day when she was confronted with the frightening reality of the blows,” Miguel Cruz Tejada, a New York correspondent for El Nuevo Diario, a newspaper based in the Dominican Republic, wrote on Jan. 17.

Among Spanish-language news outlets, the trial has been covered daily by the newspaper El Diario-La Prensa and by New York 1 Noticias, an all-news cable television station. The newspapers El Nuevo Diario and Hoy Nueva York and Telemundo’s Channel 47 and Univision’s 41 have also produced reports on the trial. Articles in Spanish by the Associated Press and the Spanish-language news agencies EFE and Notimex have been published in newspapers around Latin America, including in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

The daily coverage in El Diario-La Prensa has consistently been the most-read or second most-read item on the newspaper’s Web site and has drawn reader comments from beyond New York.

“There’s definitely a sense of community involvement in the case,” said Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, the editor of El Diario-La Prensa, which has a special online supplement on the trial titled, “Nixzmary Brown Case Roils New York.”

“It’s not a community full of alienated people who fall down black holes often — but obviously, it happened here,” he said.

Mr. Rodriguez, 29, was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his family when he was 6. Ms. Santiago, 29, was raised in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, and came to New York as a teenager. The couple lived in an apartment in Brooklyn with their six children, four of them from Ms. Santiago’s previous relationships. Mr. Rodriguez worked as a security guard.

El Diario-La Prensa’s coverage has occasionally emphasized the picture painted by the defense of Mr. Rodriguez as a hard-working immigrant laboring under the stress of caring for a large family.

On Jan. 23, an article under the headline, “They Portray Rodriguez as a Good Father” was accompanied by a photograph of Mr. Rodriguez doubled over and grimacing, with a hand on his back, as he was arrested two years ago. The article describes a coffee mug found in the house that read, “World’s Greatest Dad.”

That contrasts sharply with how Mr. Rodriguez has been portrayed in parts of the English-language press. The New York Post has published headlines like “Ghoul’s Tools of Torture,” “Images of Her Agony,” and “This Face of Evil Isn’t Even Human.”

“Many times in this job I have been summoned to look upon faces of pure evil,” Andrea Peyser, a Post columnist, wrote on Jan. 17. “Most of the time, I’ve been struck by how human these monsters appear. But yesterday, I looked on the face of unadulterated poison.”

And the defense claim that Mr. Rodriguez — who has admitted to beating Nixzmary daily and to tying her to a chair in the weeks before she died — was justified in disciplining her because she was a mischief-maker who tormented her siblings, earned derisive responses.

Typical was an article published in The New York Daily News on Jan. 17 in which Scott Shifrel and Tracy Connor describe what they call “the defense’s shocking blame-the-victim strategy,” and quote the prosecutor at length:

“Prosecutors scoffed at the defense’s claim that Rodriguez was just an overwrought family man by reciting the outrages Nixzmary endured. ‘He was no daddy,’ Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh said. ‘Daddies don’t beat their little girls to the extent that all they can do is moan. Daddies don’t blame their children for their actions. Murderers do.’ ”

Luz Plasencia, a reporter for New York 1 Noticias who has covered the case for the past two years, says that in some Hispanic families, Nixzmary’s behavior would earn a slap or a spanking.

“I don’t think anyone doubts that this was out of hand and abusive, but I think what this raises is the discipline issue,” she said. “Americans will tell their kids, ‘Let’s have a time-out.’ Latinos don’t go there.”

“Some things are definitely relevant to a Spanish-speaking audience,” Ms. Plasencia said. “When they started saying she was this unruly child, I asked him to tell me more,” she added, referring to Mr. Deonarine, Mr. Rodriguez’s Spanish-speaking lawyer.

And while the Spanish-language coverage has extensively described the evidence of Mr. Rodriguez’s repeated abuse of Nixzmary, Ms. Santiago has been criticized by some Hispanic commentators who believe the primary duty for protecting a child falls to the mother.

Maria Elena Salinas, a news anchor for Univision, wrote in a syndicated column in February 2006: “Although the system has failed these children, it’s not the bureaucracy that killed them. Some people simply don’t have the capacity to be parents and some unmarried mothers don’t have the conscience to put the safety of their children above their romantic interests.”

Comments and reader responses in Spanish on the Internet, a great number of which have come from women, have also focused in general on Ms. Santiago.

In response to Mr. Tejada’s article in El Nuevo Diario, a reader who identified herself as Dalila Uffre from Rhode Island wrote, “It’s a shame that there are mothers in these situations and who permit brutal abuse.”

Another reader commenting on an article by Mr. Tejada published on Jan. 31, 2006, who identified herself as Susana from the Bronx, wrote, “Hopefully this case will serve as an example so cases like this won’t be repeated, not just here but anywhere on the planet. A piece of advice for young mothers: first mother, then wife, please.”

Alejandra Soto, another reporter who has covered the trial for New York 1 Noticias, said of the Hispanic press coverage: “There is a big question about who the bigger monster was. She is the birth mother, while Cesar is the stepfather. She needed to draw the line between discipline and abuse.”