Yesterday, the Media Research Center launched a new affiliate called MRC Latino with support from Rand Paul and the American Principles Project, a Religious Right group. On the day of its launch, MRC Latino came out with a report attacking Univision and Telemundo for allegedly having a liberal bias, suggesting that the networks are “being used as pawns of public relations” by the Obama administration. Politico reports:
The study is part of the launch of MRC’s new Spanish-language media watch group MRC Latino, which is officially launching on Tuesday. Oliver-Méndez and MRC President Brent Bozell said they hope the study and MRC Latino will lead to more conservative voices in Spanish-language media and that they plan to meet with executives at the two networks to discuss the study.
“It’s going to be outreach that we’re going to do to hopefully sit down with some of the major players in the Latino media, go through these findings and try to see if we can have a constructive dialogue,” Bozell said. “I don’t believe in any suggestion that liberals shouldn’t have their world view presented, but a, conservatives need to have equal footing. And b, you can’t use your network to actively promote a political agenda.”
MRC Latino will be run by Ken Oliver-Méndez, who “led the Bush administration’s domestic ethnic and religious media outreach, including management of the White House Spanish language web site and serving as Spanish-language coach to the President.”
While Bozell insists that the Spanish-language press is unfair to Republicans, the activist who once compared President Obama to “a skinny, ghetto crackhead” may want to consider if he himself is playing a role in damaging the GOP brand.
For example, Bozell “called for a clean sweep of the House Republican leadership if it moved forward on the issue” of immigration reform, and his group “blitzed the speaker’s office with thousands of phone calls to jam the lines and protest his stance on immigration.” He also defended Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070, a law strongly opposed by Latino voters.
Even though Bozell says he now supports greater Latino outreach and engagement, he once criticized “Big Tent conservatism” for hurting the larger movement. “We reject completely the idea of Big Tent conservatism,” he told a Citizens United event in March.
He also dismissed the Latino vote, which swung heavily towards Obama, in the run-up to the 2012 election and attacked the media for being “too busy celebrating and pandering to minority voters as the most crucial, special voters of all.”
Time’s cover carried the words “Yo Decido: Why Latinos Will Pick the Next President.”
This is odd, since whites are still 64 percent of the population. Time and CNN select the Latino vote as crucial because they want to make the Republicans cry uncle on amnesty. Time’s Michael Scherer began his cover story by slamming Gov. Jan Brewer for “the most incendiary immigration law in the country.”
But who made that law a national issue? The liberal media did. They put all the political pressure on anyone opposed to illegal immigration. It was “incendiary” despite a Rasmussen poll finding 70 percent of Arizonans supported the tougher law. The Obama-obedient media never found it “incendiary” for Obama to announce in 2011 that he was suspending most deportations in a transparently political move.
Take a look at the numbers from the Pew Hispanic Center, which estimated that 69 percent of Latinos voted for Democrats in 2006 and 67 percent for Obama in 2008. But in 2010, that percentage dropped to 60 percent, even though liberals surely tried to make Tea Party “racism” an issue to Latino voters.
Republicans shouldn’t write off the Latino vote, but they can wonder how much of that 9-percent slice of Latinos would vote Republican if they Xeroxed the liberal amnesty position. CNN and Time could wonder if Obama will hurt his Latino “landslide” by canceling pipelines and signaling a hard-left position on abortion, gay marriage and religious liberty. But they’re too busy celebrating and pandering to minority voters as the most crucial, special voters of all.
