The Miami Herald recently published an editorial in support of child attendance of adult drag shows that, although widely panned, was reprinted by other publications including the Orlando Sentinel. But interestingly enough, neither the Herald nor the Sentinel ran the editorial in their Spanish-language sister publications El Nuevo Herald and El Sentinel (Orlando and South Florida). Why is that?
The June 15th editorial, subtly titled "Republicans love parental choice, but not when it comes to drag queens", really needs no further introduction or exposition than its opening:
There was a time when the only places queer people could congregate and drag queens could perform their female impersonations and lip syncing were seedy bars and nightclubs on the margins of mainstream society. Today, drag queens are on TV, thanks to shows such as “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” social media and pop culture. Drag Sunday brunches and drag bingo are popular fixtures in South Florida. Turns out that hurts the sensibilities of some Republicans.
In the same week that the Jan. 6 committee unveiled its findings on the attack against American democracy, Florida Gov. DeSantis, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green and others were more preoccupied with children attending a drag show in Dallas, Texas. Videos posted online showed the children strutting down a catwalk with the performers and tipping them, as is customary at drag shows. “Drag the Kids to Pride Drag Show” was advertised as a family-friendly spin-off of a local bar’s drag brunch commemorating Pride Month. And now, the party of parental rights wants state entities to investigate parents who take their children to drag shows.
The primary reason behind this glaring omission is that running this editorial in Spanish would in fact expose Hispanics to the left’s ongoing attempts to normalize the attendance of children at sexually explicit drag shows. Good luck trying to explain to a socially conservative Hispanic family what the “it” is that “won’t lick itself”, or why they’re bigoted transphobes for believing that their grade-school children should neither be sexualized nor exposed to trans stripping.
But this omission is also emblematic of Spanish-language media’s continuing omission of stories that are unfavorable to the left, and further explains the community’s declining trust in its media institutions. According to an Americano Media/FIU poll, only 31% of Hispanics trust corporate establishment media. It’s no wonder, then, that Hispanics increasingly go elsewhere to get the stories that they don’t hear in the outlets supposedly created to serve the community. The left can howl all it wants about “Spanish-language disinformation”, but the selective omission of an editorial that ran in the main English-language newspaper is as much its own form of disinformation as is Spanish-language media’s omissions of the Hunter Biden laptop saga, and incessant reporting of poorly-sourced stories that were unfavorable to President Donald Trump (Trump’s Taxes, Belleau Wood, “Suckers and Losers”, etc.).
El Nuevo Herald’s omission of the Drag Queen Editorial proves what we saw with a Soros-backed group’s recent purchase of 18 TelevisaUnivision stations, including Miami’s own Radio Mambí. The war on “Spanish-language disinformation” is, at its heart, a battle over control of the flow of information to Hispanics.
