How partisan angst, conspiracies thrive in Miami’s Spanish-language media echo chamber
The caller to the Miami morning radio talk show was convinced there was something seriously off with news stories saying a radicalized Bay Area man in search of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had entered her San Francisco home in the middle of the night and attacked her husband with a hammer.
“No one has seen the hammer. No one has seen the wound,” said the caller, in Spanish, on La Poderosa 670 AM, dismissing mainstream news accounts of the attack as a “telenovela” scripted by Democrats.
It was at least the second instance that morning on La Poderosa’s Charlando en Caliente that a caller had repeated a baseless theory about the attack, illustrating how conspiratorial narratives from dubious English-language sources often find their Spanish-language echo on Miami’s AM airwaves. The latest caller had seen it on a tweet by billionaire Elon Musk sharing an article that made unsubstantiated claims — a post that the new Twitter owner had quickly deleted.
The Poderosa host, Aaron Glantz, had previously cautioned another caller to wait for the official police report, though he suggested there was a “black cloud” over the Oct. 28 attack on Paul Pelosi. This time, Glantz simply thanked the caller and moved on to the next listener in the phone queue.
The conversation — and the host’s handling of it — was one telling instance of the spread of misinformation found amid dozens of Spanish-language radio segments and social-media posts reviewed by the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and Florida International University researchers in the weeks leading up to and including the midterm elections. The review, part of a special project to spot-check the accuracy of information provided by Miami’s far-reaching and influential Spanish-language media, arose from claims and some substantial evidence that it’s rife with manipulated content.
The review found that, while some radio news hosts and commentators do provide balanced accounts of current events and political debates, others disseminate disinformation directly or indirectly by allowing callers and guests to freely repeat falsehoods or vituperation without challenge or counterpoint.
The Herald, in partnership with bilingual graduate students and faculty at FIU’s Department of Journalism and Media, monitored popular local Spanish-language shows on talk radio and YouTube, listening to more than 100 hours of programming from Oct. 17 to Nov. 11. The goal: exploring whether and how misleading accounts of political events and topics are disseminated across Miami’s media landscape — a controversy that has gained prominence as the region’s Hispanic voters have swung dramatically to the right.
The project, launched at an especially fraught political moment in what is a unique kind of American town square, provided a window into the news, discussion and political commentary reaching a large immigrant and refugee community where many people rely primarily or exclusively on Spanish-language outlets for information. And, in instance after instance, it found the political thermometer near to bursting with partisan anger and frustration.
On the airwaves and on some of the most popular social-media platforms, the conversation seemed to be dominated by highly partisan and sometimes extreme conservative voices, often trafficking in hyperbole that can verge on outright misinformation without context on topics ranging from the border and immigration, to U.S.-Cuba relations and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think there is a gamut of information and misinformation on the radio stations that we found,” said Susan Jacobson, an associate journalism professor at FIU who helped supervise the project. “There is some news you find on any news outlet, like where do the polls stand? There is some opinion-based information that was on the borderline of misinformation. And then there were different categories of misinformation.”
READ MORE: Top 4 misleading narratives found on Miami’s Spanish-language media this election cycle
Among the most striking examples of the latter, Jacobson said, was the level of vitriol directed at Democrats, who were routinely cast as “socialists,” “communists” or “enemies” bent on “destroying the country.” She noted that’s a take that appears to be effective with audiences who have fled real socialist or Communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin American countries.
“There are people for whom the wounds are still fresh and the message really resonates with them,” Jacobson said. “The level of disparagement was eye-opening, and something to further investigate, and to find a response to, so that people who aren’t in your political party are not seen as your enemies.”
Most outlets and influencers whose programs and posts were reviewed as part of the project, Glantz among them, declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests and written questions.
One executive, Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, CEO of Americano Media, a relative newcomer to the Spanish-language airwaves in Miami, dismissed the project as “partisan.”
“Americano Media rejects all labeling from liberal media outlets famous for misinformation/disinformation and analysis led by leftist academics who support aggressive regulation of free speech by DHS and FBI,” said Garcia-Hidalgo, who aims to build the first national conservative Spanish-language network in the U.S. and has said its overriding goal is to get conservatives and Republicans elected.
“We are also mildly entertained by an overwhelmingly liberal media outlet calling us overwhelmingly conservative.”
Garcia-Hidalgo’s statement was emailed by Americano’s spokesman, Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP strategist who served in the Trump campaign and administration in the Department of Health and Human Services, where he allegedly sought to block or modify scientific reports on COVID-19 that ran counter to Trump’s views.
What was said on Spanish-language media around the election?
The Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and Florida International University monitored popular Spanish-language programs leading up to and after the election, tracking notable claims. Search here to see what we heard:
‘People want to hear what they want to hear’
Some of the media content reviewed was straightforward news, analysis and discussion or opinions on current issues and politics. Much of the discussion echoed conservative and GOP talking points that resonate nationally.
According to the Herald/FIU review:
Democrats are routinely and uniformly cast by hosts, commentators and radio-show callers in harsh terms, not just as “leftists,” but also as “our enemies,” “thieves” or “degenerates.” On radio programs, speakers sometimes dispense with the “Democrat” label altogether, disparaging members and supporters of the party as “los socialistas” or “los comunistas.”
Perhaps counter-intuitively for an audience made up mostly of immigrants and refugees, the subject of immigration is cast on the airwaves and on social media in unfavorable and often inflammatory terms. Amid a historic influx of migrants, commentators and audience members routinely spoke about the U.S.-Mexico border as if it were a porous “open” boundary with little to no security, glossing over the drug seizures and hundreds of thousands of border patrol encounters recorded every year.
Echoing Trump and his supporters’ false claims that Democrats “stole” the 2020 presidential vote, some hosts questioned the integrity of U.S. elections, wondering aloud whether they should even vote. After a predicted “red wave” failed to materialize in November, commentators and callers to radio programs zeroed in on technical issues on Election Day in Arizona to cast largely unfounded doubts on results that favored Democratic candidates.
Problems such as the spike in street crime in some cities, the COVID-19 pandemic and the surging costs of groceries and gas and high inflation, are almost uniformly blamed on President Joe Biden or Democrats.
Other subjects veered into baseless theories or debunked or unproven tropes, including what some see as anti-semitic references to financier and liberal donor George Soros, claims that infectious disease official Anthony Fauci profited off the COVID pandemic, or assertions, with no evidence beyond his longtime penchant for verbal gaffes, that Biden has dementia or significant cognitive and health issues that have been concealed by the White House.
The anger and the spread of misinformation on Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves are indisputable, said Tomás Regalado, a veteran Spanish-language radio commentator and a Republican former Miami mayor. He blamed the pervasive influence of social media, a relaxation of standards by some AM station operators and hosts, and the election of Donald Trump, who in 2018 appointed Regalado to oversee the federal government’s Radio and TV Martí.
READ MORE: How Trump vs. DeSantis is playing on Miami’s conservative Spanish-language media
“The whole thing about misinformation is, they want to attract attention. They want to be relevant,” Regalado said in an interview over the summer. “They sound angry and they sound serious. And people take them at their word. I never in my 50 years on radio saw anything like this.”
Though not all Spanish-language media engage in it, rigid fealty to Trump and his GOP base is the rule on many radio programs and social-media pages, Regalado said, and voicing dissent or giving favorable voice to Democratic viewpoints has become “like a mortal sin.” He said that reflects predominant views in the Cuban-American community, still the largest audience for Miami’s Spanish-language media, and the need to draw listeners and viewers and keep them tuned in or signed on.
READ MORE: Is Spanish-language media really a free-for-all? Here’s how it is (and isn’t) regulated
“Going back to the old slogan, people want to hear what they want to hear. You comply, and they’re happy,” Regalado said.
‘Never seen anything like it’
Some of the questionable information broadcast on air or on social media comes from GOP elected officials.
On the popular YouTube show hosted by Cuban-American influencer Alex Otaola, U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar said in October that she believed the Biden administration had secretly negotiated with Cuba’s communist government to deport certain Cubans linked to the Ladies in White protest movement on the island.
The Biden administration announced shortly afterward that Cuba had agreed to again begin receiving deportation flights from the U.S. But the assertion that specific Cubans would be deported on behalf of the island’s communist government was “false,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Herald.
Asked to respond, Salazar issued a statement doubling down.
“President Biden has shown himself to be friendlier to the communists in charge in Havana than to their victims who arrive in Miami with nothing but the shirts on their back,” she said.
Anchors and newscasters often provide or allow sound bites by GOP officials without asking questions, challenging statements or providing any counterpoints, the Herald and FIU found. Similarly, callers are afforded wide leeway.
But much of the false and inflammatory discourse comes from hosts and influencers, including Otaola, whose daily far-right mashup of news, commentary and attacks on Cuba’s Communist government, celebrities and Democrats has made him a political player in his own right. Otaola, who has led political caravans and interviewed Trump, delivers rants targeting not just Democrats but also homeless people, other immigrants and even desperate hurricane victims in Cuba who fail to rise up against the government and instead receive U.S. aid.
In one instance, Otaola referred to Democrats as “terrorists” and blamed them — without evidence — for an attack on a GOP canvasser in Hialeah that became grist for Spanish-language hosts, callers and influencers.
Sasha Tirador, a veteran Democratic campaign operative based in Hialeah who has feuded online with Otaola, said she received threats after the YouTuber went after her, a claim other targets of the influencer have also raised.
The problem, Tirador contends, goes well beyond the slanted information. Because there are few on-air opportunities for opposing views, monolingual Spanish-speaking listeners are caught in a self-reinforcing cycle in which disinformation can take on a life of its own, she said. That dynamic differs from the typical spin of political campaigns and debate because disinformation often makes targets of people on the other side of the partisan divide, she said.
“A misrepresentation is very different from a lie. You are putting people’s lives in danger. I get death threats via Messenger. I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.
Efforts to reach Otaola were unsuccessful.
‘No other choice’
The market for hosts like Otaola includes both older Cubans and Hispanics who mostly listen to Spanish-language radio, as well as new arrivals, especially from Cuba, who Tirador said have been “radicalized” by exposure to an increasingly monolithic media landscape both on the airwaves and especially on social media.
Florida International University’s most recent Cuba Poll, in fact, found that Spanish-language social media and so-called influencers on YouTube and other platforms are rapidly becoming the chief source of news and information about Cuba among Cubans and Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County. The most popular influencers identified by respondents are uniformly on the far right of the political spectrum.
“The difference between misinformation in Spanish and in English is that the people listening in South Florida in Spanish have no other choice. In English, if you listen to Fox News that’s your choice. You could watch CNN or the networks or something else,” Tirador said. “If you are in South Florida and you are listening to Spanish radio, chances are you don’t speak English.”
Across the airwaves, there was little time given to liberal, Democratic or even centrist viewpoints, with some notable exceptions.
One of the highest-rated radio slots in Miami is a morning drive-time news and commentary program on Actualidad Radio 1040 AM anchored by Roberto Rodriguez Tejera and Juan Camilo Gomez that explicitly works to counterbalance what the hosts say is pervasive misinformation in the city’s Spanish-language media. (The station’s afternoon drive-time program is hosted by conservative hosts Agustin Acosta and Carines Moncada, whose claim in 2020 that a Black Lives Matter leader practiced witchcraft was widely cited in early reports about misinformation on Miami’s AM airwaves.)
“There is an audience that consumes that misinformation, and there is nothing to counteract it,” Rodriguez Tejera said in an interview, adding that most of it is driven by hyper-conservative partisanship and the need to drive ratings and profit.
“There are people who produce that disinformation content knowingly as a way of monetizing lies,” he said. “We are the only program on radio that confronts disinformation. It’s a challenge. That means we can’t just provide news, we have to explain what is true and what is not, and why that is.”
On Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves and social media, Rodriguez Tejera said, there is a cost in threats and verbal attacks to doing what he said is basic, responsible journalism. He fears that the falsehoods and vitriolic tone could lead to violence.
“I think that right now doing journalism is the most important thing, telling people the truth,” he said. “People have to be made to see the danger of lies. Disinformation hits us all.”
This article is part of a project on misinformation in Spanish-language media by the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and researchers at Florida International University. It is funded by Journalism Funding Partners, which received support from the Knight Disinformation Fund at The Miami Foundation. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of the content.
McClatchy Senior National Security and White House Correspondent Michael Wilner, Miami Herald staff writer Bianca Padró Ocasio and Miami Herald researcher Monika Leal contributed to this report.
