Univision senior news anchor Jorge Ramos has long advocated for liberal policy positions throughout his media footprint, no matter how far outside the mainstream they may be. The latest instance of these policy biases comes via the Fall 2017 issue of Compassion & Choices Magazine.
You might not have heard of Compassion & Choices or seen it on the rack at your local big-box store. This publication, after all, is solely dedicated to advocacy in support of doctor-assisted suicide. The article itself is a look back at how the organization brought Ramos into the fold and got him to run an interview on a Hispanic brain cancer patient that wanted to die. Here’s how the organization characterized the importance of Ramos’ support in securing its policy objectives:
In 2014, Compassion & Choices launched a Latino media campaign in California, where Spanish-speaking residents represent 38 percent of the state’s population. Their support is critical to passing any legislation. Our goal was to educate and mobilize Latino voters to garner their support for passing California’s End of Life Option Act.
We tailored our bilingual communications to create personal stories that would connect with Latino voters and innoculate them against the Catholic Church’s fear-based misinformation campaign. We successfully pitched stories featuring our Latino advocates, resulting in multiple interviews with national Spanish language media giants Univision, Telemundo and La Opinión. We also recruited labor leader and civil-rights icon Dolores Huerta and actor, director and activist Edward James Olmos.
And we got Jorge Ramos on board.
When you need to persuade significant portions of the Hispanic population to abandon a deeply-held tenet of their faith in order to embrace your pet policy, Jorge Ramos is your guy. Ramos, whose anti-Catholicism is a matter of record, is an obvious fit for Compassion & Choices. His recent infomercial for Planned Parenthood shows a willingness to promote the culture of death, and pitch it to U.S. Hispanics as being well within the mainstream.
But are Hispanics buying? Not really.
If this Mother Jones article (subtly titled “Assisted Suicide Is A White Thing”) is any indication, it appears that Jorge Ramos has a very heavy lift ahead of him before persuading U.S. Hispanics to abandon long-held cultural norms in order to embrace the culture of death. And that's a good thing. Given that the article showcases Ramos' interview of Miguel Carrasquillo on Al Punto (which we featured here), is it worth asking whether assisted suicide is also part of Univision's corporate "Agenda Latina."
Considering Ramos' frequent departure from what is considered to be mainstream within the community, it is also worth asking whether Ramos can credibly continue to be called "the voice of U.S. Hispanics". For the record, I'm still a strong no.
