VIVA NOLA June-July 2023

20-something years into this career and say this crew is truly my
extended family was beyond special,” she said.
Bustamante’s accomplishments include four Emmy awards, one
Telly, several Associated Press awards for best anchor, and three
regional Edward R. Murrow awards in 2011 for writing a documentary
about the Affordable Care Act in Virginia. She also received one for
breaking news in 2004 in New Orleans and a Peabody Award for
coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Before that, she traveled to
Cuba to cover the first gubernatorial trade trip between Louisiana
and Havana under President Bush. She also co-hosted LIVE with
Regis and Kelly with the late Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa.
Bustamante devotes much of her efforts to raising awareness
about diversity in media, and she has been lucky to count on
managers with the vision of supporting diversity before it was a
global trend. As a young girl in New Orleans, she used to call the
Spanish radio station to request songs at her father’s command,
and the anchors would keep her on to chat with her live on the air.
In Virginia, she served as the morning news anchor for La Selecta
103.3 at WVXX-FM, a Spanish-language radio station. In Philadelphia,
she also anchors for Telemundo62. While she strives to neutralize
her Cuban Spanish and takes advice from her Venezuelan and
Colombian colleagues on certain words, she tells young Latino
journalists who aspire to be in the news not to lose their Spanish
language, as the need for information in Spanish is growing. She
pays special attention to immigration news and strives to provide a
balanced account of the stories of Latinos in town.
She has made it her mission to bring fairness to veterans’ stories
in the media. In conjunction with NBC News, Bustamante created
the “American Vets” reporting series, where she and other journalists
around the country are covering issues impacting veterans in the
states and abroad. In November 2022, she co-hosted and coproduced
American Vets: Beyond the Battlefield, an NBC News
Now Veterans Day streaming special highlighting the issues our
veterans with PTSD face. “I realized there was this false sense of
patriotism in the media when they would aim for the military and tell
stories a certain way to propagate this idea that being military and
patriotic means being extreme. I said that is not how we live,” said
Bustamante.
Much news coverage is based on identities, which can celebrate
diversity. “There is a movement for promoting culture with employee
resource groups and corporate spaces where they want you to talk
about your identity: as a woman, as a Latina, and as a person of
color,” Bustamante explains. A superficial focus on those identities
can create division and extremism, which happens more in
underserved communities. “If you don’t tell the stories of what most
of them [Veterans] are like, then you’re going to have these hate
groups attaching themselves to only one trope of their identity, and
it’s the violent side, and that’s not OK because that’s farther from the
truth; and the media it could be farther from the truth,” she says.
With this project for NBC, Bustamante and her colleagues have
been covering veteran stories more deeply as a network and in
individual newsrooms. The project continues to grow, paired with an
effort by NBC Universal to hire more Veterans in their newsrooms.
“There is no need for corporate TV America to pin them [Veterans]
against each other when that literally can lead to the destruction of
our American society,” says Bustamante.
While championing important issues, Bustamante continues
representing New Orleans wherever she goes. She misses her
hometown’s sense of community and the South’s warmth, which she
knows is hard to find elsewhere. “There’s a reason that you have
three network morning shows anchored by women with New Orleans
ties; we just know how to show the love, we know how to receive it,
we know how to give it,” she says.
Returning to New Orleans isn’t a plan. For now, Philadelphia is
good for her family. She will continue providing balanced information
to English and Spanish audiences and champion the causes she
believes in. She is now at the Den of Distinction of Loyola University
and will continue to be
celebrated here
because New
Orleans loves
Lucy.
Lucy Bustamante. Photo Credit: NBC10
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