Annotations for Communities: Puerto Ricans

Puerto Rican leaders met with NBC executives to discuss a recent episode of Law and Order, which showed women being attacked at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. NBC issued an apology and promised never to rerun the episode again.

Although producers of the show were upset over the network's apology, Manuel Miraval, president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, says TV producers are out of touch with the issue.

And I think that the production companies are hiding behind this principle of freedom of speech in order to ignore their responsibilities to the community at large. If you have free will and freedom of speech allows you to do something, it doesn't mean that you should go ahead and do it, knowing that it is going to harm someone else.

NBC last apologized to the Puerto Rican community about a year ago, when an episode of Seinfeld depicted the burning of the Puerto Rican flag. That episode was also removed from the network's rerun rotation.