Univision Partners with U.N. to Push Climate Change Agenda
Israel Ortega /
Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
Walter Cronkite once said, “In seeking truth you have to get both sides of the story.” Well, if that’s the case, then our country’s biggest Spanish-language network has no interest in providing Hispanics in the United States—this nation’s fastest-growing and youngest demographic—with the truth on the issue of climate change.
According to a press release from Univision Communications—which controls multiple Univision Web, radio, and television properties—the biggest Spanish-language media company is partnering with the United Nations Foundation to increase “awareness about climate change and…its effects and innovative solutions in combating the problem.”
Issac Lee, president of the news division of Univision Communications, describes the partnership this way:
In our ongoing effort to inform and empower Hispanic America, it is paramount that increasingly crucial environmental issues such as climate change have a prominent place in our reporting, as they affect our audiences directly….This alliance with the United Nations Foundation will give us direct access to the most up-to-date and reliable global information and resources, as well as to the newsmakers in the field, thereby enriching our news programming in that area.
There’s one important problem with Mr. Lee’s announcement: The science on climate change is far from settled. As Nick Loris, Heritage’s Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow on environmental issues writes, although there may be a near-universal consensus that man-made emissions have some warming effect, the scientific community is still debating the future conditions of our planet.
But perhaps even more important than the disagreement among the scientific community when it comes to climate change is the fact that most of the policy prescriptions will “drive up energy bills and therefore increase prices for other goods and services.”
Has Univision Communications forgotten that the Hispanic community has one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country and has seen a precipitous decline in its median household income during the last few years? Why boost policies that could adversely affect millions of Hispanics in the United States?
Univision’s partnership with the United Nations comes on the heels of reports by BuzzFeed that Univision is working hard to tailor its programming to encourage folks to sign up for Obamacare.
As we have been reporting, the Hispanic media have displayed a markedly liberal bias. Conservatives must do a better job in reaching out to influential Hispanic media, but when Spanish-language network executives ignore dissenting voices on issues like Obamacare and climate change, it certainly calls their journalistic standards into question.