Topic: Media Research Center
Jorge Bonilla spent a Sept. 30 MRC Latino post gushing over how "Telemundo anchors José Díaz-Balart and Felicidad Aveleyra were in for a shock as they revealed the results of an online poll that asked viewers’ take on who won the presidential debate." That "shock": a poll on Telemundo's Twitter account claiming that President Trump won the first debate with Joe Biden. Bonilla fuirther gushed: "The initial result announced on air was 66%, but the final result grew to 69%."
Unscientific polls are notoriously inaccurate, and opt-in polls like the one Telemundo used for this post-debate poll are doubly so, since they are so easily manipulated by partisans who can get together and plot to skew a poll (back in the day, this used to be called "freeping," after the right-wing message board Free Republic, where its users would regularly plot to skew a poll.). The MRC itself called out such "entirely insignificant and unscientific surveys" in 2017.
Bonilla, however, portrayed the meaningless Telemundo poll as accurate and legitimate -- he offers no evidence that the poll wasn't freeped by right-wingers -- before going on to insist it is a harbinger for alleged Hispanic support of Trump and a message to purportedly anti-Trump Spanish-language media (needless bold italic in original):
These results come as a shock to a Spanish-language media that is vested in both a Biden win and Trump loss, and in a debate result that reflected those desired outcomes. Despite years of biased coverage in news media and an obvious anti-Trump bent in Spanish-language media, a significant number of Telemundo’s viewers viewed Trump as a clear winner.
But there’s one more shock: An Instagram poll designed to clean up last night’s final result showed Biden to be the winner of the debate by identical margins (69-31), but also found Telemundo viewers in agreement with President Trump’s decision to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court (62-38!).
In the coming days Spanish-language media will have to deal with uncomfortable issues that have been suppressed from their viewers but brought out in the debate: such as, for example, the dealings of one Hunter Biden. We see, yet again, that viewers of Spanish-language media are in open revolt against the media that claim to serve them.
Yeah, not so much. Right-wingers can't even make the case to native English-speakers that Hunter Biden is a thing for anyone outside the right-wing media bubble Bonilla resides in.
