The primary point of my initial (Jan. 29) report on the mayor’s defunct marriage was to highlight L.A.’s lazy news media (particularly The Los Angeles Times).
Now that the mayor’s scandal has broken wide open, which news media is the most reluctant to report it? The Spanish-language news media such as Telemundo, Univision and LA Opinion.
As Eric Longabardi has shown at ERSNews.com, Telemundo was happy to use Mirthala Salinas’s intimate connections to Latino politicians because, like its Spanish language peers, it has no journalistic standards.
Spanish language TV is particularly pathetic. They’ve never given Villaraigosa critical scrutiny.
It must be mandatory for the women on Spanish-language news to dress slutty. I remember spending two weeks in Puerto Rico in 1980 and I was shocked at how their television was much more sexually charged (particularly the ads).
The Spanish language news media is not held to the same standards as the mainstream press, an MSM journalist explained to me. Little is expected of them. The soft bigotry of low expectations.
In Mexico, journalism is a corrupt occupation. It’s assumed that Mexican journalists are on the take.
That attitude has transferred to Los Angeles. Latino culture here doesn’t value journalism and newspapers. If it did, La Opinion would have the highest circulation newspaper in L.A. just as a Spanish-speaking host has the highest radio audience.
The black press is even worse. The Los Angeles Sentinel is pathetic, filled with angry screeds and little original reporting. The best of the ethnic papers is the Jewish Journal.
On July 19, I emailed Pedro Rojas, editorial director of La Opinion, these questions (he did not respond):
How would you rate the aggressiveness of Spanish-language media on the mayor’s marital troubles?
In your opinion, do the Spanish-language news media hold themselves accountable to the same journalistic standards as the regular press? Or is the mayor regarded as "one of us" and covered accordingly?
ERSNews has exclusively obtained e-mails documenting that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was receiving written questions in advance, sometimes days in advance, before television interviews that were conducted on the Univision Los Angeles based television station KMEX-TV34. The questions were then asked during on-air interviews conducted by the stations in-studio anchors for a segment known as "Villaraigosa a su lado", which translates from Spanish as "Villaraigosa on your side".
The so-called broadcast "interviews" were conducted regularly on Wednesdays each week in 2006 and through mid-2007.
The questions sent to the Mayor were represented to the public as impromptu-unscripted questions. ERSNews had uncovered they were anything but that. The topics ran the gamut of issues concerning Villaraigosa’s job as LA’s mayor.
ERSNews has learned that the questions were provided to the Mayor in advance via a direct link. That link was the Mayor’s Deputy press secretary Diana Rubio. Rubio was working directly with the Executive Producer of Univision and others at KMEX, including at the time the station’s Vice President of News. Other news staff was well aware of the communications and the intertwined relationship the station had developed with the Mayor’s office. According to sources familiar with the situation, the mayor’s office exerted extensive influence and sway in insuring the Mayor was not put in any light other than a favorable one, something Univision accommodated routinely.
ERSNews has the obtained emails, parts of which are translated below (the verbatim text in Spanish as communicated between Univision news executives and the Mayor’s deputy press secretary Ms. Rubio can be seen here:
