What is the deal with accents? Some news organizations and networks noticeably have begun to accent the names of individuals, places and things that carry a Spanish spelling. Some don’t. ESPN is almost meticulous about it. PBS not so much. The New York Times does it; other newspapers – of all news organizations that should – do not. How Spanish names and words began to lose their accents has itself been lost in time. Most of the loss, of course, has to do with the disrespect for the language fueled by anti-Spanish sentiment leading up to and after the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Spanish wars. As important was the market of the time.
Now, amid the new demography of the country, seeing a Spanish name in print or on a television screen with an accent stands out as much as seeing the same name the very next day without one.