Our domestic Spanish-language media have refused to cover both the court-packing questions that currently haunt the Biden-Harris campaign, and the campaign’s refusal to address them. There exist two fundamental reasons behind this omissive silence.
First of all, these networks look to the courts for rulings that are favorable to the policies that best suit their business interests. Univision, for example, has filed a number of amicus briefs on matters before the United States Supreme Court (DACA, the Census), and provided laughably one-sided coverage to litigation on other issues (abortion, the Public Charge Rule). A liberal court, or in the alternative a packed court, is best positioned to provide the relief these networks seek. As Jorge Ramos himself once said, the survival of Spanish-language media depends on continued lax immigration policy:
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR ANCHOR, UNIVISION: I think the future of Spanish-language media is assured for decades, simply, for a very simple reason: Despite of the fact that the majority of the growth within the Hispanic community is coming from people being born here, we still have one to two million immigrants, legally and illegally coming in every single year. Most of them speak Spanish. So, therefore, we have a market that is growing and growing.
And I think we can assure you that in the next few decades, you’ll see Spanish-language media. That’s another topic completely, but the Latino community is keeping so many elements from their country of origin, including Spanish- 9 out of 10 Latinos speak Spanish…speak Spanish at home- that- and we’re doing things that Italians didn’t do, or Russians, or Eastern Europeans didn’t do- and the closeness to our countries of origin and the communications that we have are keeping Spanish-language media alive. And thanks to that, it’s a new power that other immigrant communities didn’t have in the past.
Second: viewers of Spanish-language media are quite familiar with court-packing schemes in places like Venezuela, where socialist strongman Hugo Chávez packed the Supreme Court of Justice until he got rulings that were more to his liking. Honest reporting on the continued refusal of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to address the court-packing question would put networks in a very uncomfortable spot- especially after having spent the last two years reassuring viewers that Bernie Sanders’ brand of “democratic socialism” is totally not like what you see in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Court-packing blows all that to smithereens. Better, then, to suppress the issue entirely- which is what they have done so far.
We are reminded of that classic Latin American idiom, “he that keeps silent concedes”. That silent concession doesn’t just apply to Biden-Harris on the court-packing question, but also to the Spanish-language media that are complicit in this silent concession, due both to business reasons and to the ongoing evasion of any serious discussion of the Chavista precedent that court-packing would set.
Click here to read Media Research Founder and President L. Brent Bozell III’s letter to the FCC, in strong opposition to a proposed rule change that would allow Univision to fall under 100% foreign ownership.
Read more: newsbusters.org
