This past Spring semester Professor Clara Rodriguez's  "Latino Images in the Media" (SOLP3000) class worked in collaboration with Consumers Union--the publishers of Consumer Reports--on a television monitoring project. As part of the project, selected student papers will be featured at hearusnow.org and Professor Rodriguez and a one of her students were invited to sit down for a roundtable discussion of the project with Consumers Union Esther Perterson Fellow Magda Herrera, Esq. The conversation, which will become the basis of a hearusnow.org podcast, was recorded in the Faculty Technology Center at Lincoln Center (LL 416). Some  pictures  of the session are available from Professor Joachim Rennstitch, who dropped by. Background on the project: Consumers Union has established, as part of its policy office in Washington, DC, a web site called www.hearusnow.org. As the site's name indicates, this new effort by Consumers Union follows Consumers Union's "long tradition of promoting a fair and just marketplace by empowering consumers to fight for better and more affordable telephone, cable and Internet services or equipment. By focusing on major media, technology and communications issues and emphasizing local stories, HearUsNow.org will help explain increasingly complex issues and the connections between these issues, underscore what's at stake, and offer ways to make improvements." One of the few non-partisan sites in the media-watch area, it seeks to be a "consumer voice for communications choice." As part of their interest in diverse communities, the students in professor Rodriguez's "Latino Images in the Media" course participated in a television-monitoring project that involves podcasting for this web site. The papers that the students wrote for this course will also be placed on the web site. For a minimum of five weeks, the students used monitoring forms that I developed to monitor the following Nielson ranked: "Top Ten Primetime Broadcast TV Programs (by Total Households) for the 2005-2006 Season Through 2/12/06." Entertainment Programming: CSI (Vegas), CBS, Thu 9pm Desperate Housewives, ABC, Sun 9pm Without a Trace, CBS, Thu 10pm Grey's Anatomy, ABC, Sun 10pm CSI: Miami, CBS, Mon 10pm NCIS, CBS, Tue 8pm Lost, ABC, Wed 9pm Cold Case, CBS, SUN, Various time slots, during this period Law and Order: SVU, NBC, Tue 10pm CSI: NY, CBS, Wed 10pm In addition, three students monitored the top three network news programs, with, according to Nielsen, the largest audience share: Nightly News, NBC World News Tonight, ABC Evening News, CBS Finally, two students focused on the top-rated primetime television program time-slot--as rated by Nielson--on the largest Spanish-Language network, Univision. [On the list of the top ten entertainment programs, but excluded from the monitoring project because the genre deviated substantially from the majority of shows on the list were Reality Shows, Monday Night Football, the News Magazine, "60 Minutes," and one half-hour situation comedy show, " Two and a Half Men."]