As gauged by old-fashioned- journalistic content analysis—which simply counts the number of words, headline size, and other plainly observable elements of newspaper copy—the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Prop. 187 was balanced. But such analysis is limited. According to recent research in cognitive science, common metaphor appears to be the key element of language that people use to make sense of their social world. In brief, what you say (or read) is what you get.

The controversy over the exclusion of the Latino experience from Ken Burns’s recent documentary The War raised important questions not only about how he and PBS view Latinos, but more generally about Latino and Latin American images in the media.