The controversial softball-strewn Donald Trump–Enrique Acevedo interview that aired on Univision, the Spanish-language broadcast juggernaut, is back in the news.
Trying to reframe his image with Latino voters, the former president’s team reportedly worked through his son-in-law Jared Kushner‘s close connection with Bernardo Gómez, co-CEO of TelevisaUnivisio Mexico, to create a positive Univision presentation of Trump, whose immigration policies and migrant-threatening rhetoric haven’t warranted such anodyne treatment, according to critics.
The interview created a spectacle that former Univision President Joaquin Blaya called an “insult to the Hispanic Community,” describing the result as a “one-hour propaganda open space for former president Trump to say whatever he wanted to say.”
[As Popular Information‘s Jud Legum summarized, the interview let “Trump present a variety of false and misleading claims. Trump, for example, falsely claimed that “Democrats were killing babies after birth,” that Americans are currently “paying $5 for gasoline,” and that Biden puts “China first” because he “got a lot of money from China.”]
That blowback was prelude to the syndicated column unleashed this weekend by Univision’s most famous star journalist, Jorge Ramos.
Ramos, whose rancorous history with Trump saw him escorted out of a press conference during Trump’s first presidential campaign, wrote that the Univision interview was an abdication of duty by the network — and that his employer had failed an ethical journalism test in airing it.
“We cannot normalize behavior that threatens democracy and the Hispanic community, or offer Trump an open microphone to broadcast his falsehoods and conspiracy theories, Ramos wrote, stating that it is “our moral obligation to confront him” and that it is “dangerous” not to do so.
