Six Ways Fox Demonstrated Its Disconnect From Latinos During Hispanic Heritage Month

From September 15 to October 15, while many in the United States celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month by honoring the culture of the largest minority population in the country and commending its contributions, Fox News continued to demonstrate its disconnect from Latinos and the issues that affect them most. The network’s coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month was limited to highlighting one high-level Hispanic person during three-minute segments every Saturday, while simultaneously ignoring numerous relevant stories concerning Latinos, denying the impact certain issues have on Hispanic people, mocking relevant members of the community, and providing a platform for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to smear them. Here are six examples:

Fox Was The Only Cable News Network To Ignore Trump Supporters’ Racist Attacks On A Hispanic Journalist

On September 12, senior political writer Henry Gomez of Cleveland.com wrote a piece outlining the influx of “racist, hateful messages” from Trump supporters attacking his Mexican heritage, messages that he says “parrot[ed] a lot of Donald Trump’s greatest hits.” CNN and MSNBC interviewed Gomez and asked about the ethnic slurs he received while covering Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Fox News was the only prominent cable news network not to cover the story.

The O’Reilly Factor Mocked Prominent Hispanic Journalist Jorge Ramos

On the October 4 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly dismissed Tim Kaine’s Spanish language skills by arbitrarily taking a jab at one of the “most influential” Hispanic people in the U.S., journalist Jorge Ramos, commenting, “You can be boring if you speak Spanish. Have you ever seen Jorge Ramos?” Attempting to rehabilitate his unwarranted insult on Ramos, O’Reilly later called his remarks “a good line and a cheap line” and said that “Jorge Ramos is not boring” but did not apologize.

Fox Gave Donald Trump A Platform To Further Attack Former Latina Miss Universe

After it was revealed that Donald Trump had attacked former Miss Universe Alicia Machado about her weight and Hispanic heritage, Fox & Friends provided him with a platform to further smear the pageant winner, and he claimed she was “the absolute worst” and “impossible” to work with because she “gained a massive amount of weight.” Trump’s smears were met with no pushback from the Fox hosts.

Fox’s Sean Hannity Advocated For Stop And Frisk, A Policy That Negatively Targets Blacks And Latinos

After the October 4 vice presidential debate, Fox host Sean Hannity and Fox regular Rudy Giuliani made the case for stop and frisk. But the policy has been shown to have disproportionately “targeted blacks and Latinos,” according to CNN's Jason Carroll, who noted that the practice was deemed unconstitutional in New York City in 2013 and that officials “say the practice severely eroded relations between police and the communities they serve.” Fox figures routinely laud the use of stop and frisk, even though Hispanic media and mainstream outlets have discredited the practice as ineffective and an example of racial profiling.

Fox’s O’Reilly Misidentified CBS’ Elaine Quijano As “A Latina” And Speculated She Would “Go After Pence About Trump’s Statements And Miss Universe”

During The O’Reilly Factor’s pre-vice presidential debate analysis, Bill O’Reilly misidentified debate moderator Elaine Quijano as Latina and commented that because of her ethnicity “you’ve got to assume that she’s going to go after Pence about Trump’s statements, and Miss Universe, and all of these other things.” Quijano is in fact Asian-American. Meanwhile, Latinos in the media had been blasting the debate commission for its failure to include a Latino moderator.



Fox’s Eric Bolling Denied That Latinos Are Disproportionately Victims Of Police Brutality

On the September 23 edition of The Five, co-host Eric Bolling insisted that “the number of people killed [by police], whether white, black, or Hispanic, is proportional to the amount of violent crimes [they] commit.” This runs contrary to statistics and feeds into a deceiving right-wing media narrative that downplays police brutality against blacks and Latinos. In fact, many media outlets have been pointing out that police brutality against Latinos is often underreported, and Hispanics are increasingly more concerned about racial discrimination.