Hispanic media covering Elon Musk negatively, silent about Twitter Files and free speech issues

America’s increasingly powerful Spanish-language media networks have largely ignored covering core free speech issues such as Twitter's censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden's laptop investigation, and instead focused on stories portraying Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase in a negative light, an ADN America analysis concluded.

Spanish language press largely focusing on criticism of Musk, ignoring free speech issues

The Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, published a report on Friday on how the Latino corporate press “overtly ignore” Elon Musk's release of the censorship files via journalist Matt Taibbi (and then by journalist Bari Weiss)."

Univision, according to MRC, “aired the story over their morning and midday news editions and not during primetime, giving the actual subject of Twitter’s censorship a skimpy 15 seconds framed” and only “within the Trump Derangement Syndrome box."  

“This morning there is growing rejection of former President Trump for saying that parts of the constitution should be canceled following the release of the Twitter censorship files. As per the former president, they revealed massive fraud in the 2020 elections, though he didn't provide any evidence,” Univision wrote. 

A few days later on Monday 12th, despite the fifth tranche of released of information from Weiss, the powerful Spanish-language television networks continued to remain silent on their websites, according to an ADN America search of the network's public archive.

Instead, reports of San Francisco authorities probing allegations of Musk setting up bedrooms at the Twitter headquarters got airtime at Latino networks as did the news of Musk momentarily losing his ranking as the world’s richest man, the media watchdog added.

​​"If what’s happening with the Twitter files will portray negatively on Trump we would be covering it four times a day," a prominent Telemundo network employee told ADN America only on the condition of anonymity. 

"Not only do we not cover the “Twitter Files,” we don’t cover the Hunter Biden laptop either, it's pathetic," added the source who has worked for the Hispanic language network for several years. 

Polling shows strong interest in censorship and free speech issues despite lack of coverage

In March 2022, a survey conducted by polling company YouGov revealed that one-third of Americans felt that the media did not focus enough on Hunter Biden's laptop.

While 33% of Americans surveyed in March 2022 had never heard of Hunter Biden's laptop computer, that number was significantly higher within the Hispanic community with 43% of respondents admitting they had never heard anything about it, and 42% indicating they had only heard “some” about the matter.

Of all Hispanics surveyed, only 15% said they had heard a lot about the Hunter Biden laptop story. 

The most recent news story appearing on the Telemundo national website about Hunter Biden is a translation from NBC News from May 2022. That story focused on Hunter’s company rather than the laptop.

After that the most recent articles dates back to 2020, according to the results generated in its search engine, and is an article that says that “the FBI is investigating a possible foreign operation to discredit Biden before the elections" without any correction or mention of the censorship of the New York Post by social networks.

“It is not yet known whether the emails cited by the Post are authentic or have been manipulated,” the story published from Telemundo reads, and remains today without any correction or update. 

Still, the network has devoted several articles to the issue of Spanish-language misinformation, especially in South Florida, quoting mostly the concerns of Democratic political operatives, suggesting a bias to the left. 

Silence on Spanish media about the Twitter Files or Hunter Biden however, is not an anomaly.

Other November Univision articles about Musk also revolve around questioning whether Twitter will survive after his purchase, and almost all of them project a negative tone towards the Tesla CEO after the acquisition.

The media group's most recent piece about Twitter discusses a report about “possible resignations” after Musk sent an email to Twitter employees saying their job would become “extremely hard.” 

Despite this, Hispanics seem to have a significant interest in stories about Twitter transparency.

Another YouGov survey found that only 5% of Hispanics surveyed in December 2022 believe that social media companies maintain transparent policies or share the processes they use to regulate and remove content despite 48% wishing they did. 

Still, Spanish-media appears to be near silent on the issue.

In another more recent example, Miami's El Nuevo Herald focused its Monday coverage on how Musk was booed at a David Chapelle performance by republishing a report by left-leaning wire service EFE, but neglected to highlight the debate on freedom of expression in the public space. 

A search by ADN America did not locate any article referencing the Twitter Files despite journalist Bari Weiss publishing a new batch of information that same day while several English-language media sources covered the story. 

In tandem, a similar soft news report about David Chapelle’s was also published at CNN en Español on Monday the 12th.

El Dallas Morning News, Telemundo, The San Diego Union Tribune, Bloomberg en Español also echoed the EFE-distributed showbiz news, but their Spanish-language services did not reveal a report in the Twitter archives. 

Other mainstream Hispanic media outlets such as La Opinión in Los Angeles, El Nuevo Herald in Florida also failed to reveal any search engine results on their coverage of the Twitter Files. 

CNN's Spanish-language network reporting about the censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop also seems to be largely driven mostly by the so-called “Twitter Files” without any significant prior coverage of the issue. 

The negative tone about Musk and the lack of coverage of the Twitter Files seem to expand even to more center sites such as Argentina digital publication Infobae, which maintains extensive coverage of U.S. events and for several years has been at the top of the most read Spanish-language media, globally.

On its Monday, Dec. 12 front page, Infobae also covered the story about Musk getting booed during Chapelle’s show, but ADN did not locate any mention of the Twitter Files during a search of the site. 

Political bias within the U.S. Hispanic-media in the U.S is not new.

In 2014 The Media Research Center, conducted a four-month analysis of weekday evening newscasts aired on Univision and Telemundo, concluding that the networks' domestic coverage was “dominated by partisans” from the left and that major Hispanic networks displayed a clear liberal bias in their national news coverage.

The lack of coverage on the issue contrasts with the coverage given by media outlets such as Fox News, the New York Post, and even center line beltway publications such as The Hill.

Does media bias affect voting? 

Citizen distrust of the media and their perception of media bias have increased in recent years in many democratic nations, raising troubling questions about whether media bias could have a potential impact on election results. 

According to a decade-long report from the National Bureu of Economic Research more than 70 percent of Americans believe that there is either a great deal or a fair amount of media bias in news coverage.

Evidence of bias ranges from the topic choices of the New York Times to the choice of think tanks to which the media refer in their broadcasts.

The National Bureau of Economic Research writes:

“In The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting (NBER Working Paper No. 12169 authors Stefano Della Vigna and Ethan Kaplan address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News into cable markets and its subsequent impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced into the cable programming of 20 percent of American towns. Using voting data for 9,256 towns, the authors investigate whether Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000.”

That study concluded that the introduction of Fox News had a small but statistically significant effect on the vote share in presidential elections between 1996 and 2000.

Republicans gained an estimate of between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News and also found that Fox News had a significant effect on Senate vote share and on voter turnout.

Their estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican according to a first audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to a second, more restrictive audience measure.

Almost one million migrants became U.S. citizens during the fiscal year 2022, the highest number in a decade and the third-highest annual record in U.S. history despite the fact that Hispanics need to pass an English proficiency citizenship test, according to a new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration (USCIS) report

Still, data suggests most still consume media in Spanish.

“Much of the content Latinos are seeking is in Spanish, regardless of their “primary” language. For example, in our Spring 2021 national radio panel, we see that a full 74% of Hispanics who listen to Tejano music are English dominant, along with 40% of listeners of Latino Urban, with 69% of listeners of Spanish Tropical Format identifying as bilingual. Spanish language content doesn’t only draw in Spanish speakers. We see this phenomenon in TV too, where in 2021, a Spanish language show hit the top 10 list for all streamed content for all audiences in any language,”  an extensive Nielsen study on Hispanic media explains.  

According to the Nielsen report only 17% of U.S Hispanic households speak only English leaving the majority of U.S. political landscape in the hands of large Hispanic networks with local presence in large Hispanic demographics such as California, Chicago, Miami, New York, Arizona, Texas, Georgia and others. 

As MRC pointed out however, evening newscasts aired on Univision and Telemundo showed that the networks' domestic coverage was “dominated by partisans” from the left with no single conservative television catering to Hispanics National. 

Local stations such as America TeVe in Florida, which lean conservative, particularly on their coverage of Cuba policy remain an anomaly on the media ecosystem, while other recent independent online efforts still appear to lack penetration or cultural relevance among Hispanics nationally.