The 2020 presidential election hasn’t been decided as of this writing, but the New York Times is bitter and panicky about Joe Biden’s surprisingly big loss in Florida and dug up a pathetic excuse: Hispanics were the victims of "disinformation"! In Thursday’s edition, reporters Patricia Mazzei and Nicole Perloth trotted out “Experts Call Disinformation Targeting Spanish Speakers an ‘Emergency.’”
It’s a follow-up to their story that miscategorized conservative opinion and hyperbole as “misinformation” and dangerous falsehood, to boost Biden among the Latino community of South Florida, including those Cuban Americans the paper has never quite trusted for voting anti-Communist because of their experience with tyrant Fidel Castro. Calling "moderate" Biden a "socialist" is now a "lie" (click “expand”):
The posts proliferated on election night before anything remotely definitive was known about the results of the presidential race. “Robado,” they falsely repeated again and again in Spanish: President Trump was being robbed of a victory. He had won Arizona. George Soros was funding violent “antifa riots.”
The baseless social media messages to Latinos trying to delegitimize the election and the results for Joseph R. Biden Jr. circulated online on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, part of a disinformation campaign to undermine Latino confidence in the vote as it unfolded.
Ahead of Election Day, false news in Spanish tried to turn Latinos against Black Lives Matter and tie Mr. Biden to socialism, tactics that experts said could depress the Hispanic vote. Now that voting is complete, the rampant falsehoods have only garnered larger audiences -- including among immigrants less familiar with the institutions of American democracy. The gist of the falsehoods is that the election is “rigged” against Mr. Trump.
Get a load of this condescension-reeking photo caption:
Supporters of Mr. Trump gathered in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami on Tuesday. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how much false claims influenced Latino voters ahead of Election Day.
So Cuban-Americans, perhaps ignorant of American democracy, were hoodwinked by rhetoric into voting against their interests? Here's what they claimed: “On another Spanish-language channel, Informativo G24, with more than 500,000 subscribers, hosts compared Democrats to Nazis on Tuesday. The video was seen some 350,000 times.”
Republicans get called Nazis everywhere, all the time, without disapproval or even notice from the New York Times. Those claims by both sides may be irresponsible, but they do count as opinions. But for the Times it’s flat-out false to suggest Biden is a socialist, even though his party has been infected with Democratic Socialism, a movement the Times proudly pushed before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Now, when the Democrats have an election to win, it's a smear.
The paper piled on the condescension toward Trump-leaning Latino voters (click “expand”):
It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how much false claims influenced Latino voters ahead of Election Day. But the hub of much of that misinformation was South Florida, home to a diverse community of Latinos, many of whom fled left-wing authoritarian regimes and are receptive to messaging about socialism.
(....)
Juan Pablo Salas, a Colombian political analyst in Sarasota, Fla., said he worried that the misinformation involving Bogotá, Miami and Washington could be a coordinated effort between right-wing interests in Colombia and the U.S., “to essentially turn our Colombian-American community into the tip of the spear of the offense played by the extreme right.”
The paper gets awfully mad when you criticize liberal billionaire activist George Soros.
On Tuesday night, Eduardo A. Gamarra, a professor of political science at Florida International University, agreed to analyze the election on NTN24, a television news network based in Colombia. He found himself on the air debating Omar Bula Escobar, a former United Nations representative notorious for, among other false claims, saying that Mr. Soros controls the Democratic Party, an anti-Semitic trope embraced by QAnon.
(....)
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Democratic Latino issues strategist in South Florida, said she spent four hours on Tuesday trying to debunk false claims on Spanish-language radio that Mr. Biden, a moderate, was a left-wing radical.
Going by his voting record, Biden is no “moderate.” And he will be pushed by socialists in the Democratic Party who want to use him to further their policy goals. Biden certainly hasn't disavowed their support. He installed a very liberal VP choice, Kamala Harris, as his running mate.
Yet somehow this standard exaggerated campaign rhetoric becomes a “lie” when Republicans do it: “The Republicans called him a socialist, in those four hours, 20 times,” she said. “And a radical five times, and a Castro-Chavista” -- a reference to Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela -- “three times. Repeat a lie and repeat it until it becomes the truth.”
