Oh, I didn't realize you are not from America...
I listen to talk radio. I listen to NPR. I listen to radio news channels. Call it nerdy or boring, but I get information fed to me all day long. Talk radio is based around personalities, and is rightly so as it is meant to be entertaining; requiring a character to entertain you. News channels, and some NPR programs, however are just read articles with a sound byte here or there for flavor. As long as you have a nice voice and an understandable cadence, then it doesn't really matter who is reading the news to you.
Unfortunately, some of the people whose job is to read this news to you do not share in my opinion. I live in the DC metro area, and on the radio, the #1 news station is 103.5 WTOP FM. It is your around the clock news station is 'traffic and weather on the 8's' (practical and catchy...). Anyhow, I couldn't tell you more than one or two names of the news anchors on the station despite me having listened to this station consistently for the past 5 years. But, there is one I can remember and will recognize immediately and it pisses me off every time I hear her. Her name is Patricia Guadalupe. She is a veteran reporter well known in the DC area. The main reason she is well known is after every report, she hits the listener with an out of nowhere accent switch to pronounce her name. She doesn't say "Patricia Guadalupe, WTOP News"; rather she says "Patreeeeseea Wadaloopay" in full on Spanish accent. Whatever news she is reporting is said in a slow articulate manner, much like Tricia Takanawa without the asian accent, where she trails off on the end word and never strays far from the average tone (read: dull). So, you get this one or two minute piece in regular old English, and then BAM! Spanish name. It is so distracting I almost forget what the damn piece was about as I am busy being pissed that it is this reporter once again over pronouncing her own name.
The problem is that I am not exactly sure why I get so pissed off at this. I don't have anything against Mexican Americans or Latin Americans and I admit that I wouldn't mind learning Spanish myself. I could care less about the reporters who give my news everyday. There is just something that bothers me about it. It doesn't fit. It's distracting. It's just egregiously bad. You can see this reporter's profile here. It doesn't help that she looks like a middle class white lady, despite being raised in Puerto Rico.
So yes, she has latin heritage. But she reports the news in flat normal American accent. The name drop just comes with such a sudden switch that it negates the past 30 seconds of words you just took in while you contemplate the new sounding speech pattern that just bludgeoned your ears. Nobody cares that a reporter is bilingual. I just want butt plain english spoken to me without external distractions. I do not need any insight into who the reporter is or where she is from, yet that is what this lady seems to want to do. She needs to make sure we know that she is a full blooded Latin American and if you were to for some reason contact her at the station, you must pronounce her name the same way or else you are wrong. This conclusion may be a bit exaggerated, but there is this underlying snobbyness I get when I her say her name on the radio. I'm sure it's not meant that way, but that's what I hear.
In reality, it not as much of a burden as it is a fun thing to make fun of every time it is heard. You can probably say "Patreeseea Wadaloopay" to anyone in DC and they can laugh with you at the absurdity. So, much like the way I treat the things that piss me off and I have no control over, ol' Patty G just gets laughed at and mocked. It's just that pissed off type of joking that could go bad any second. Fortunately, the news keeps coming and the traffic report soon distracts me again from my last thought. Why was I pissed again?
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