Latinos’ Rightward Shift Has Democrats Crying Disinformation, Republicans Say

Democratic activists in Florida, citing the widespread dissemination of what they call misinformation and disinformation about Covid, election integrity, and Democratic candidates, are waging a campaign to rein in Miami’s famously vitriolic Spanish-language media outlets.The activists have found a willing ear in the all-Democrat Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In recent months, the caucus has demanded an FBI investigation into the alleged misinformation, lobbied tech firms to boost their efforts to police social media in that sector, and attempted to upend the sale of a Miami radio station because the new owners fired one of the few liberal voices on the South Florida airwaves.Major media outlets have picked up the mantle, publishing stories about what is termed a misinformation “crisis” plaguing Latino voters. One of the more vocal activists is Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost her re-election bid in 2020 to Republican Carlos Gimenez. One of the reasons she lost her seat, she said at the time, was because of a “targeted misinformation campaign” aimed at Latino voters in her district.In a recent hearing of the congressional Committee on House Administration held at Miami, Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said the issue is “threatening our freedoms, our democracy, and the future of our nation.”She asserted that misinformation campaigns have “grown to what seems to be a well-funded and well-coordinated effort that is reaching audiences across print, social, and mainstream media.”Conservatives in Florida, however, see a different reason for the full-court press from Democrats — they are losing ground to Republicans among Latino voters. In the 2020 election, President Trump performed significantly better among Latino voters in key battleground states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than he did four years earlier.“Democrats are panicking about their Hispanic problem and need ‘misinformation’ conspiracy theories as an excuse for their failures and a pretext to censor speech,” tweeted Giancarlo Sopo, who oversaw Spanish-language TV ads for the Trump campaign in 2020. “They’ve been openly calling for censoring Hispanic conservatives for a while.”The progressive activists have circulated a dossier of what they call the most egregious examples of disinformation from hosts on two Miami radio stations and the audiences who called in to them during the week following last year’s riot at the Capitol.Comments about election fraud, the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, the perpetrators of the Capitol riot, Black Lives Matter protests, and the excesses of the “extreme radical left” are all cited as examples of disinformation. Comparisons between Democratic candidates and communist regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua — exiles of which are known to make up a good portion of those stations’ audiences — was another topic deemed problematic by the report’s authors.“Disinformation does not exist in a vacuum, but instead it is strategically used to legitimize conservative narratives about Democrats, progressive policies, and social justice movements,” the authors concluded.South Florida’s Spanish-language radio, dominated by Cuban exiles, has been a hotbed of right-wing shock talk for decades, most of it directed outward at the Castro regime across the Florida Straits. More recently, however, with Castro’s demise, the hosts have turned more often to discussion of domestic U.S. politics.The evolution partially explains the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s reaction to news that one of the few moderate stations in the area, Radio Caracol, was being sold and converted to right-wing talk in the summer of 2021. When the new owners immediately fired a progressive-leaning host, the caucus asked the Federal Communications Commission to intervene in the deal in the interest of preventing misinformation in the Latino community.The senior Republican on the FCC, Brendan Carr, who was appointed by President Trump, objected to the caucus’s interference in the sale, saying it “crosses a line drawn by the First Amendment.“The FCC has no business doing the Democrats’ bidding or using our regulatory process to censor political opinions that Democrats do not like,” Mr. Carr said at the time.In addition to the radio airwaves, the activists have targeted social media as a significant source of disinformation and have asked tech companies to do more to tamp it down. Last month, members of the Hispanic Caucus demanded in-person meetings with the heads of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to discuss the issue.“As Hispanic Members of Congress, we have a duty to provide oversight of the role digital platforms play in how we communicate with our communities and how our communities receive important information,” a letter to Facebook’s leader, Mark Zuckerberg, said.The Democratic group that compiled the so-called disinformation dossier, Florida Rising, headed by Andrea Mercado, wants the FCC to monitor Spanish-language radio stations and hold the stations accountable for what is said on their air. “Our civic discourse should not seek to amplify hateful voices that lead to violent attempts to undermine the will of the people and instead promote a deeper analysis and center voices that are often neglected or dismissed,” Ms. Mercado told the House committee at Miami.The director of the conservative Media Research Center’s Spanish-language arm, Jorge Bonilla, believes — like Mr. Sopo — that such efforts by the Democratic activists are acts of desperation.“What you are seeing is a breaking of the dam of how information flows to the community,” Mr. Bonilla said. “The end goal of all this is to restrict the flow of information to Hispanics and to be able to ensure that Hispanics only get news and information from select, approved outlets.”While acknowledging that some of the commentary on Spanish-language radio in South Florida may be caustic, he said that’s the cost of living in a free-speech society.“There’s crazy in all corners of the world,” he said. “There are 9/11 truthers out there saying that that was an inside job, but you don’t hear anyone trying to shut them down or calling them a danger to democracy.”

Latinos’ Rightward Shift Has Democrats Crying Disinformation, Republicans Say

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