“There is something to be said for the warm cocoon of academia, and its ability to draw out the true thoughts of radicals,” Jorge Bonilla writes at NewsBusters. “Univision News President and Fusion CEO Isaac Lee’s recent presentation at the University of Texas at Austin was certainly no exception:”
Lee’s eye-popping remarks should serve as a timely reality check for conservatives looking at how to factor in Univision as part of their Hispanic outreach/inclusion strategies. During a Q&A with NYU professor Jay Rosen, Lee was asked about Univision’s “theory of trust” as related to the network’s impartiality and news coverage. Here is the crux of the Univision News President’s answer in all its glory.
“I think if you are an American journalist covering the Second World War, it’s not a problem for you to want the Nazis to lose. And I don’t think you need to be saying ‘Well, you know, the Allied Expeditionary Force Commander says this, and on the other hand the Fuhrer says that.’ I think it’s ok to understand that sometimes you have to be on the right side of the issues in history,” said Lee.
Strangely enough, I find that Lee’s reductio ad Hitlerum of those who are ideologically opposed to Univision’s agenda is both horrifying and refreshingly honest. Conservatives should know exactly where they stand in terms of what coverage to expect on the issues — immigration and beyond — and should conduct themselves accordingly.
Click over to see the video of Lee’s paranoid style* in all its glory, and his non-sequitur of a reply — you can deem yourself as being “on the right side of history” — no matter how big a cliche that phrase is — and still report to the best of your ability both sides of a story, as most American news agencies did during WWII. But sadly, Lee’s far from the only prominent socialist at a national TV network who paradoxically views his opponents as National Socialists. In 1964, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr infamously smeared Barry Goldwater, descended from Russian-Jewish immigrants, as a crypto-Nazi, a disgusting slur magnified by the power of midcentury mass media, a period when CBS represented well over a third of TV news coverage, given ABC’s comparatively anemic ratings at the time. In 1996, Ted Turner, likely terrified of the potential ratings success of Fox News (and justifiably so in retrospect), described the network to the L.A. Times by saying that “The late Führer, the first thing he did, like all dictators, was take over the press and use it to further his agenda. Basically, that is what Rupert Murdoch does with his media.”
More recently, the host of the CBS Evening News, picking up where Uncle Walter left off, when asked why he didn’t feature both sides of the global warming debate in his presentation responded, “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” (Wow, what a terrible thing to imply about Barack Obama!)
And just today, MSNBC* ran the photo on the right-hand side of this tweet to smear Scott Walker:
@MarkSKrikorian @JonahNRO Scott Walker reprising Dennis Hopper’s role in The Twilight Zone’s “He’s Alive.” pic.twitter.com/3ffdZwKn6M
— Bradley Steffens (@SteffensBradley) April 22, 2015
You stay classy, old media.
* And don’t get Jay Rosen started on news media figures he disagrees with, of course.
** And speaking of MSNBC…
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