Yesterday the blog, Think Progress, picked up a video from our web site, and before we knew it, Salon, Philly.com, the Huffington Post, and a number of other web sites followed suit. It even spawned a few internet memes. 

Perhaps you saw the stories about Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett not being able to find Latinos for his staff? Yes, that's the one. It was prompted by a question Al Día posed to the governor when we had the opportunity to interview him for an hour on May 17. 

There was a right hubbub after Think Progress' Igor Volsky posted his story to their site. Lots of "binders full of Latinos" jokes. Lots of excoriation of republicans and how blind they are to Latino concerns and to Latinos in general. It got tweeted and retweeted. People commented, memes were made and online news organizations noticed.

The Spanish saying is: el pez por su propia boca muere (the fish dies because of its mouth) and it is especially true for politicians. You say it, we're going to print it; you say it on video, we're going to post it. That's how we roll.

The uproar was interesting. Not least of which for this reason: We've heard comments exactly like the one that landed Corbett in hot water before. Often, in fact. We have been running editorial roundtables with politicians, CEOs, leaders of civic organizations large and small, for years and this same question — "How many Latinos are on your staff? Upper management? Board?" — is always asked. 

Call it our litmus test.  Almost everyone fails it. In fact, if we get an answer that rings in above zero, one or two, we take notice. 

So the outrage and attention Corbett's answer got is indicative, really, of two things. 

One, that the governor, already unpopular, has a lot of work to do before he launches his reelection bid. He needs to look and see how he can serve the growing Latino constituency in ways that cut across economic and class lines.

The second takeaway is instructive in a different way.

Neither Think Progress nor any of the media organizations who picked the story up named Al Día as the source of the video. It is standard journalistic practice to do so, but because Think Progress didn't nobody else did either. Which means they didn't verify the source. Which means the best anyone did is name us "a Spanish-language newspaper in Philadelphia."

This is bush league. Very. 

Imagine embedding a video from the Village Voice and saying only that it originated from an English-language newspaper in New York City. Imagine seeing the Philadelphia Weekly or the Philadelphia Inquirer referred not by name but as English-language papers from their city of origin. Imagine not naming them at all because, after all, why would Latino newspapers, Latino journalists, Latino web sites need to get credit for the work we do?

It grates. Particularly because the question we asked of Corbett — all of the questions we asked him during that hour — were questions centered on the Latino experience that no mainstream paper in Philadelphia ever asks him.

Plus, Think Progress did exactly what they were accusing Corbett of doing. 

"I don't see the Latinos" doesn't work for governors. And it doesn't work for news web sites either.