‘A Common Set of Facts’ 

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“To me, politics is about accountability,” says Rose Arce ’86. “It’s about asking hard questions of the candidates about what their positions are and how they would affect actual people — and making that connection.”

For over three decades, Arce has been asking the hard questions, first as a reporter for newspapers, including the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, where she and her colleagues received the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting, and later as a producer for CBS and senior producer at CNN, where she spent nearly 15 years producing documentaries, investigations, and long-form features with award-winning journalists Maria Hinojosa ’84 and Soledad O’Brien, along with a team of CNN producers that included four Barnard graduates. Her work, which has won her three Emmys, has uncovered corruption and inequalities, amplified marginalized voices, and led to policy changes and reform.

Arce first got her start in community journalism in the mid-1980s at a newspaper in upstate New York. Since then, she has watched the industry hit with a tidal wave of change that’s decimated local newspapers across the country. “The degree of accountability that’s present when you have aggressive local journalism is integral to a community functioning,” says Arce. “I don’t mean just because people get information; it’s because we’re working with a common set of facts. People know why their taxes are high, they can question why their schools are of poor quality. … They know who’s running for office and what their record is.”

For Arce, there’s a clear correlation between good journalism and an informed citizenry, but the loss of local newspapers, she notes, has made communities all the more polarized and less engaged in the political system.

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“Now there’s this incredible void. And I fear that all of that has made elections more difficult,” she says. “So we now have an environment where two people in any given small town in America, who disagree about something in politics — something as simple as a Republican versus a Democrat — are not operating with factual information on either side.”

These challenges, though formidable, have not deterred Arce. In fact, at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and shuttering, they’ve made the work she’s doing all the more pressing. Today, Arce serves as the vice president of Soledad O’Brien Productions (SO’B). The company, founded by O’Brien in 2013, develops and produces television and film content on key issues and current events, from a documentary on the end of affirmative action to a series on an organization’s fight to bring awareness to marginalized missing persons cases.

Arce is currently directing SO’B’s latest documentary, War on La Radio, which takes a close look at how the parties are battling for the Latino vote, through what Arce explains is the “medium that they most connect to, which is radio.”

The project aims to provide insight into Latino voters, who have historically been misunderstood by politicians but who are critical to the outcome of the election — and have been for decades. Every presidential campaign season, Arce says there is a push to report on the Latino vote, and yet the parties still have a limited grasp on the communities.

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“The Latino voter story is one that I’ve either been assigned or simply done because nobody else was doing it every four years going as far back as the Clinton campaign … and what’s really disconcerting about it is that it hasn’t really changed so much,” she says. “I start asking the political parties how they’re approaching the vote, and really there aren’t huge differences in the way they do it. They wait until the last minute. They don’t necessarily know what’s going on in communities. They assume that all Latinos essentially have the same background, interests, concerns, even though they’ve immigrated at some point in their past from 21 completely different nations.”

The documentary, however, aims to tell a more nuanced story and explores how Spanish- and English-language radio has long been the primary vehicle for the Latino community to get news, access information, and engage in politics. According to a Nielsen report released in 2023, 94% of Latinos over 18 listen to radio on a monthly basis, more than any other platform. To better understand the perspectives of Latino voters, Arce put O’Brien on radio stations that target Latinos.

“We let her talk to the listeners and let her talk to the DJs, and we really dug deeply into what’s happening in the community, voting in the community, and then we went and talked to the experts about what is the messaging coming from the parties and does it match?” explains Arce. “And as has been the case over many presidential elections, the interest from the parties is coming late, the messaging isn’t always matching, and the battle over Latino voters is fought in panic.”

While the documentary is rooted in the present, it offers essential historical context. “It actually began,” says Arce, “in the grape fields of California with Cesar Chavez, the legendary labor leader and activist, who realized that it was difficult to organize people and bring necessary information to Latinos if he didn’t have a medium to do it on.”

In 1983, Chavez founded the Radio Campesina network as a means to “both entertain and instill a sense of community for Latinos and working families,” according to the Cesar Chavez Foundation. Radio became a crucial way to reach Spanish-speaking workers, such as truck drivers, domestic workers, and farmhands, who listen to it on their commutes.

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“Radio is much more trusted by Latinos because it comes through for them with accurate information about immigration, healthcare, et cetera. And radio is something that continues to be listened to by working-class people,” says Arce.

The documentary, which was released just a month before the election, is another example of Arce’s career-long commitment to telling timely, impactful stories that move the needle and inform the public.

“There was never a time that I have experienced where it was more important for journalism to rely on facts and not emotions, impressions, and agendas,” says Arce. “I’m happy to be a part of reporting on this political season — even if it’s not in the most controversial area, because I think it’s important that people remember that in this election, as in all the others, there’s not just one thing going on.”