Univision, Like Most Media, Leaves Out the Real 'Pocahontas' Story

November 28th, 2017 10:24 PM

As you know by now, President Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as "Pocahontas" at a White House event honoring the legendary Navajo Code Talkers. But Univision's national newscast, like most media, left the most important part out of their coverage of the latest brouhaha related to the nickname the President uses to refer to his likely 2020 Democrat opponent.

Here is how Univision anchor Jorge Ramos reported the incident. See if you can spot the bias by omission:

JORGE RAMOS, UNIVISION ANCHOR: Today, President Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" at an event to honor indigenous Navajo war heroes. He said that they had a representative in Congress who was referred to as "Pocahontas", a nickname that he has used against Warren on other occasions. Shortly thereafter, Warren accused President Trump of using a racist slur. The White House insisted that "Pocahontas" is not a racist slur.

Univision made no effort to explain to its viewers that “Pocahontas” is, rather than a racial slur as reported and parroted throughout the liberal media, is a very specific, pointed critique of Elizabeth Warren’s misappropriation of Native American heritage in order to land teaching jobs at Harvard and Penn.

Mockery, and NOT racial animus, is what lies at the heart of “Pocahontas”, and the media know it.

The issue was first widely reported five years ago, when Warren first ran for the United States Senate. In fact, here's a sample from the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, back when she was at Politico:

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a "telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996)."

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was "Intersectionality and Positionality: Situating Women of Color in the Affirmative Action Dialogue."

"There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries," the piece says. "This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reasons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995."

Ramos left out this half of the story in order to score a quick and easy 'racism' hit against Donald Trump. Univision's viewers, left without full reporting on Warren both in 2012 and 2017, have no idea.

P.S:  I'm not aware that Ramos, Unafraid Asker Of Tough Questions, has ever asked Warren to clarify this reporting...something to keep in mind for 2020.