Jorge Ramos casts a large shadow over Univision’s news operations, and is still held in high regard as a journalist among his peers and the audience he serves, notwithstanding recent exhortations to colleagues to drop the pretense of neutrality.
Univision’s nationally syndicated radio operation - on the other hand - is dominated by a fiery leftist demagogue with no journalistic pretense, and no desire to pretend to be interested in offering a balanced argument to his audience.
Meet Fernando Espuelas (which means “spurs” and is, I must confess, one of the cooler names in radio). His show is carried daily by Univision America radio in several of the nation’s top Hispanic media markets. Both the Fernando Espuelas Show and its subsidiary English-language podcast are an exercise in unbridled progressive projection and wish casting, when not advocating for imposition of the standard progressive policy package. If Jorge Ramos is the face of the network, then Espuelas is its quintessential id.
This little nugget from his podcast titled “Tea Party vs Latinos” sums it all up quite nicely:
“We know, with certainty, that the new Republican Party is a party controlled by extremists looking to implement a radical agenda that protects the interests of the one percent of the one percent over the 99.99 percent of all Americans. Moreover, we’ve witnessed that groups like the Koch Brothers are willing to buy elections, buy candidates and dupe voters with crazy lies. They sell fear instead of hope. They’re playing to the pessimism of an America going through a deep, deep recession. They scare millions of Americans into believing that immigrants – and in particular, Latinos - are evil invaders, criminals, with a dark plan to assume control of the “Real America”.
On Conexión Texas, Espuelas described his agenda thusly:
“In terms of discussing the Republican Party in such an open manner, the custom in journalism is to try and balance (coverage). If one is speaking to Jesus Christ, then you (also) invite the devil in order to see what the other point of view is all about. But I believe that the situation here is quite clear, no? We have a party whose platform is the deportation of the maximum possible number of persons. We have the last presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who said so openly, and whose advisors said, “Our plan, if we win, is to make life impossible for immigrants so that they go to another country. We have the Congress, the House of Representatives controlled by the Republicans, which did not vote for immigration reform after it was passed by the Senate and the president said he would sign it. And so there is no gray area here in which we can interpret things differently. “
Jorge Ramos famously said, “I will never tell people who to vote for.” Espuelas has no such constraints. He will tell you who to vote for, how to think, and why you are either dumb or a racist for daring to think differently.
Given the hard-left biases that are clearly prevalent throughout its media properties and its dominant personalities, is it still appropriate to consider Univision a reliable news organization, or is it time to regard the network as little more than the media arm of the progressive Left?
I’ll answer that in my next post.
