As Hollywood prepares for Sunday’s Academy Awards, Fuse is shining a light on the underrepresentation of Hispanics among the major Oscar acting categories.

Fuse has teamed with the National Hispanic Media Coalition to bring more attention to the fact that none of the Oscar nominees for best actor or actress is Latino. Further, Latino actors and actresses have only garnered 16 nominations and six wins in 90 years, according to the Huffington Post.

The NHMC is planning to demonstrate the day before the Oscars to bring light to the disparity.

“We want to help them get the conversation going – they are the watchdog of Latinos in media, and they are there to elevate Latino voices on air and online, and that’s what we are here to do,” said Judi Lopez, Fuse senior vice president of distribution and affiliate marketing. “It’s important that we’re raising the issue and locking arms with them.”

Added NHMC president Alex Nogales: “We applaud Fuse for standing up for the Latino community by helping us drive awareness for this incredible inequity in representation. More media companies need to take notice and need to follow the example.”  

On Sunday, against the Oscars telecast, Fuse will air commercial-free the 2014 dramedy film Dear White People, which examines escalating racial tensions at a fictitious college. As part of that telecast, Fuse will also premiere several interstitials featuring footage from the 1950 classic film Cyrano de Bergerac, starring José Ferrer (pictured) -- the only Latino actor ever to win an Oscar for best actor. The remixed footage will use humor to call attention to the lack of Latino representation and provide thought-provoking facts on inclusion in entertainment, Fuse said.

“The interstitials are a play on what’s going on and how ludicrous the [Latino] representation – or lack thereof – is in the Oscar categories and in Hollywood,” Lopez said. 

Indeed, Latino actors and actresses represented only 3.1% of speaking roles in major Hollywood films from 2007 to 2016, Lopez said. With 56 million Hispanics in the U.S., the numbers are embarrassing.

The lack of Latino actors and actresses in prominent speaking roles may also be affecting Latino movie attendance. Lopez said Latinos represent 24% of movie ticket buyers today, down from 32% of movie ticket buyers just four years ago.

On the flip side, movies that have significant Latino representation and reflect the culture, such as Disney’s animated film Coco, can perform well at the box office. The Mexican folktale-themed film with a predominately Hispanic vocal cast has generated more than $208 million in domestic box office sales since its November 2017 release, according to Box Office Mojo.

“At 18% of the population, Latinos are still over-indexing on buying movie tickets, but you have to ask the question as to why those movie ticket buying numbers are down,” Lopez said. “Maybe its because they’re not seeing themselves represented in the movies, and representation and engagement is key. When you see yourself on television or in the movies, it resonates deeply.” 

Lopez said the network is in the planning stages of developing other initiatives that will continue to tackle the issues of inclusion and diversity beyond the Oscars both on its linear network and online. 

“This is going to have at least raised the issue during the moment in time we have here during the Oscars, and we’re going to keep on that mission,” she said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of visibility within the Latino community, and we’ll continue to look for opportunities to keep amplifying it.”

The National Hispanic Media Coalition filed suit against the FCC's Restoring Network Neutrality order Friday (Feb. 23), one of several legal challenges expected to be filed.

The suit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the court with principal jurisdiction over challenges to government agency rules.

The order's publication in the Federal Register Thursday (Feb. 22) triggered the window for filing legal challenges to the Dec. 14 decision to eliminate the rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization, as well as a general conduct standard that could get at other ISP activity.

NHMC says it is suing the FCC to protect the rights of Latinos and other marginalized communities to speak and be heard online."

NHMC argues the order--actually a declaratory ruling, report and order, and order--is arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of the FCC's discretion.

Related: FCC, FTC Will Team Up to Monitor Open Internet

In the order portion, the FCC denied NHMC's motion that informal FCC complaints NHMC had obtained through a FOIA request be included in the record and put out for comment before a decision, calling it a "pretext for delay."

“Throughout the proceeding NHMC uncovered 50,000 of the FCC’s own net neutrality consumer complaints -- clear evidence that the 2015 Open Internet Order provided adequate consumer protections," said NHMC VP and general counsel Carmen Scurato. "Nonetheless, the FCC charged ahead without considering this key evidence as part of its rulemaking proceeding, a striking violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. NHMC will continue to raise this fatal error in process and will fight in court to reinstate Title II Net Neutrality.”

The FCC has denied a request by the National Hispanic Media Coalition to extend the initial comments deadline on its network-neutrality proposal.

The initial comments were due July 17, with replies due Aug. 16. 

NHMC had asked on July 7 that the FCC extend the comments period until 60 days after the agency complied with NHMC's outstanding FOIA request for the 47,000 network-neutrality complaints the FCC has received.

The group contended the extension was needed to "ensure that all evidence relevant to this proceeding is available to the public, and that the public has adequate time to analyze the evidence and comment accordingly."

Daniel Kahn, chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau's Competition Policy Division, said the FOIA request did not justify a lengthy delay of the network neutrality item.

Kahn said that while the commission, under FOIA guidelines, could have simply denied the request for the 47,000 complaints outright because it was unreasonably burdensome, FCC staff has worked to provide "responsive" information, including providing NHMC with 1,000 responsive complaints and an offer to provide an additional 2,000 by Sept. 1, along with responses from carriers, 1,500 relevant e-mails, and a spreadsheet with all 47,00 complaint numbers and additional data fields.

Kahn said NHMC is free to address the relevance of additional documents in its reply comments, or ex parte filings, or after the deadline for comments since the docket does not close and comments can still be filed.

"If the Commission made a practice of delaying comment cycles in response to FOIA requests that require extensive redactions, it would provide parties that oppose particular proceedings an avenue to grind those proceedings to a halt," Kahn said. "The Commission will continue to strive to enable NHMC to review and comment upon the information that it has requested."

Input continued to pour in following President Donald Trump's signing Monday (April 4) of a resolution nullifying the FCC's broadband privacy rules after Hill Republicans approved it on close, politically divided, votes in both Houses of Congress.

Privacy groups promised to fight on while advertisers said the fight was over "innocuous" info that didn't warrant "barrage" of opt-in notices.

"By vetoing the repeal of the broadband privacy rules President Trump could have sent a powerful message that he heard Americans' demands to have a real say over how their personal information is used and shared for commercial proses, and was willing to stand up for them," said the Consumer Federation of America.

But given that the President added his imprimatur, what now? "This fight is not over," vowed CFA. "The Consumer Federation of America and the other organizations with which we work will continue to push for real privacy protections for Americans."

The National Hispanic Media Coalition was similarly displeased and similarly ready to continue the fight.

"With the stroke of his pen, President Trump quietly sealed the fate of FCC regulations aimed to protect the private information and web browsing histories of Americans across the country," said Carmen Scurato, director of policy and legal affairs. "Latinos value their private information and will not soon forget a President who failed them, especially in light of all the public concerns he has for his own privacy. The act was a clear gift to Internet Service Providers at the expense of the American people. But the American people were not quiet during this process and left one resounding message: we will continue to stand together to preserve and protect the open internet."

Michael Copps, former FCC chairman and now a special adviser to Common Cause, saw it as a handover of consumer rights to big business by the President.

"Privacy goes the way of populism as Trump rolls over again for big business," he said. "Despite a campaign filled with rhetoric about the plight of forgotten Americans, Trump has once again come down on the side of corporate profiteering at the expense of Americans who don't sit on corporate boards and can't afford a $200,000 membership at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. Trump has flip-flipped on his own campaign promises and handed over Americans' right to privacy to those with the deepest pockets."

Looking at it from an entirely different angle was the Association of National Advertisers, which had pushed the FCC to reconsider the rules and Congress to repeal them.

“This rule would have required vast amounts of innocuous information to be treated suddenly as highly sensitive and needing opt-in consent from consumers," ANA said in a statement. "This is an important major step to help assure a level playing field for privacy regulation for all businesses, and to see to it that consumers will not be bombarded with incessant opt-in notices. ANA also is pleased that the leadership of the FCC and FTC have committed to working cooperatively to return primary regulatory authority over privacy issues to the Federal Trade Commission, which is where we think it should rightfully belong due to the FTC’s long history of oversight and expertise in the privacy arena.”

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), a longtime advocate for privacy online, particularly of children, and a frequent critic of media companies, said the rule rollback "will give giant internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T an open invitation to more easily collect, share, and sell your personal information without your consent."

“All Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, and I believe that right extends to the internet,” said Franken, ranking member of the Senate Privacy Subcommittee. “Your digital footprint—the sites you browse, the apps you use, and the sensitive data you provide to websites—deserves to be protected. President Trump has made a grave mistake by signing this disastrous legislation, which will deepen the pockets of big internet conglomerates like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T by allowing them to more easily broker your private information. This law is as anti-consumer as it gets—it gives broadband providers free rein to collect, share, and auction off your data to the highest bidder without your consent. Your privacy is under threat, and I plan to fight back. We cannot allow corporate profits to outweigh consumer privacy rights.”

WASHINGTON — Not everyone was celebrating Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai's first public meeting vote to relieve cable operators and broadcasters of some public-file reporting requirements.

The item had been teed up with a unanimous vote to propose the changes under then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, and was seen as a noncontroversial start to the Pai tenure.

But the National Hispanic Media Coalition said the vote "deprives Americans of meaningful information about the scope of their community’s feedback."

The FCC voted to no longer require TV stations to keep or post viewer letters and emails, while pointing out viewers can still contact the station, and the agency, with their input, which will be taken into account when a station files for a license renewal.

"This is exactly the time that the public is looking to build trust with the media, fostering a productive dialogue that supports accurate coverage representative of diverse voices," Carmen Scurato, NHMC director of policy and legal affairs, said.

“In allowing stations to eliminate the only publicly accessible means to understand how audiences across the country are responding to commercial broadcast coverage, the FCC does a tremendous disservice to all who seek to support journalism that fulfills the public interest obligation it holds,” Scurato said. “We are very concerned that continuing the current practice of putting letters and emails from the public in a file has been deemed too burdensome a task in the face of the urgent need for media accountability.”

At the meeting, Pai said: “There is little, if any, connection between the correspondence file requirement and its purported goal of ensuring that a station serves its local community. After this decision, television viewers and listeners will still be able to communicate directly with a station by letter, email, or through social media. The public will continue to be able to file petitions or objections concerning a television station licensee’s performance at the time the station files its renewal application. Stations will still have every incentive to serve their communities in an increasingly competitive marketplace.” 

A new group called the Coalition Against Hate, which includes the National Hispanic Media Coalition, is taking aim at the incoming Trump Administration with plans to push "media platforms" to "abandon hate speech as a model," it said.

The coalition said it will warn of the dangers of using the "alt-right" label to describe what it said is actually white supremacy, and that it will take issue with Trump appointees and staffers.

The candidate himself has broad-brushed Mexican immigrants as rapists and Muslims as potential terrorists and his tapping of Stephen Bannon of the Breitbart news site drew a firestorm of criticism from those who see that site, and Bannon, as facilitating hate speech..

There have been past efforts to get the FCC to crack down on "hate speech" that incites violence.