I tried to call the fellows at the Politico.com website in northern Virginia earlier this week.  No, not about Herman Cain.  I wanted to make sure that its Friday tip sheet for the Sunday morning news programs includes Fareed Zakaria’s GPS.  The tip sheet gives a heads-up on whom the producers of the main networks have invited as guests, and Zakaria’s Global Public Square by far overshadows anything on the other networks.

This is no small matter, especially for HispanicLatinos who are a globalized population in a globalized world.

The other “news” programs consistently regurgitate the inside-the-Beltway gossip and speculation that has been repeated endlessly throughout the week.  Those shows no longer square, pun intended, with reality.

The reality is that the affairs of the nation – and therefore its politics – are determined as much by events outside the country as the actions of an obtuse member of Congress who doubles as Speaker of the House or a Republican Party taken over by the Tea Party.

In contrast to the other Sunday programs, Zakaria offers guests who are schooled in both the current American political melodrama and the wider world of global politics.  It would be nice, for example, if viewers were given a better sense of the European debt crisis – not yet settled – and how it might boomerang into the country’s weak economic recovery and the presidential campaign.

Not that it all falls on the Sunday news programs, but if more of the public during the last 40 years had become more aware of the globe beyond the Mideast and the subcontinent, perhaps it would have pressed for changes in the education system that is now a drag on the country.  Perhaps it would have pressed for investments in infrastructure so that passenger trains do not have to share railroad tracks with freight trains in 90 percent of the country.  Perhaps the pubic might have prevented the former President Bush from squandering the world’s empathy after the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, and been able to prevent him from launching two disastrous wars.

Instead, Americans through the years went about blithely unaware of how other countries were beginning to marshal their populations and harness them with new technologies and to organize many millions more to undercut workers in American factories.  The country is in freefall compared to other nations.

From a journalistic perspective, the Sunday news shows are fine – for what they are.  What they are not is more important in today’s world.  It seems an ill use of time for HispanicLatinos in this country to watch Meet the Press or Face the Nation.  Come to think of it, the networks seem unaware of the existence of the HispanicLatino population, seldom including HispanicLatino talking-heads in their endless programming.  I wonder if that is why the Spanish-language television networks are more than holding their own with programs like Univision’s Al Punto with Jorge Ramos.

The globalized nature of the HispanicLatino population places on its shoulders the responsibility to learn how to exist in the future, not to hear a discussion of Herman Cain’s political ad that features a smoker or accusations of sexual harassment.

Zakaria looks more like the new world we live in – and he makes sense about it.

If it’s Sunday, it’s GPS.  And Jorge Ramos.

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