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 further 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 online polls). 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.