What's the matter, Florida GOP? Scared of losing radio outlets that repeat your lies? (Opinion)

[In It to Win It]

Miami Herald via Yahoo News

An informed community — one that not only flaunts the word “freedom” but actually practices its most basic component, free speech — shouldn’t be a threat to anyone.

Yet, Florida’s GOP and its Cuban-American supporters are in a tizzy over the prospect that the sale of two iconic Miami news radio stations will open to debate the Republican-monopolized political conversation in the county’s Spanish-language airwaves.

What are they afraid of, losing fake news outlets?

Because, with the announced sale of legacy stations Radio Mambi and WQBA to the newly formed Latino Media Network, Republicans in Florida seem to be losing the most important mouthpieces they’ve used to spread misinformation among Miami-Dade’s faithful Cuban-American and other Hispanic voters.

Truthful information has been hard to come by on Cuban radio.

Even pro-Trump media outlets, for example, retracted lies about the nature of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the 2020 election results. Not Miami’s Cuban radio, where one host kept blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and pounding the lie, with zero evidence, that Donald Trump had won the election and Democrats committed voter fraud.

Cuban radio hosts constantly cast Democratic candidates — and anyone with opposing viewpoints — as a socialist and a communist. Their unchecked broadcasters, accountable to no one, also pass on pandemic misinformation, falling down the rabbit hole of right-wing conspiracy theories. They are a danger to their listeners.

Americans might be tempted to ask, “Who cares?” There’s false information spread in the English-language media, too.

The difference is that while news sources are plentiful in English, for many voters who live in an insular world and get news primarily in Spanish, radio is what they rely on, and broadcasters prey, unchallenged, on fears that the United States could become what they left behind.

[mucifer]

1. We are decades behind the GOP in obtaining radio stations. This is something but still

a drop in the bucket

[In It to Win It]

2. Well, every full bucket

starts with a drop.

[EYESORE 9001]

3. In the case of radio stations, goopers already own the buckets

and half the water in those buckets. Liberal voices on radio must fight a strenuous uphill battle to be heard.

[EYESORE 9001]

6. I do what I can

I hear a lot of discouraging voices telling us that nobody under the age of 80 listens to radio anymore - strident voices willing to concede the entire medium to conservatives and their ilk. I would listen every day to liberal content on over-the-air radio.

[halfulglas]

7. This is one reason there is so much resentment among blue collar workers to

What they think Dems have become. Even the "little things" like AM radio. It's not true that nobody listens to the radio anymore. Just because they don't, they assume nobody else important to them does either, so therefore it isn't important to anyone else. They forget that not everyone has satellite radio and they may listen to AM radio while they drive to and from work or at work. As much as I hate talk radio, many people feel very connected to these and don't know they may be frauds as human beings. My late MIL was legally blind and listened to the radio all day and Rush and his local ilk changed her. I remember driving cross country in the 90s how huge swaths of the US had no FM stations even and all you could get were AM stations.

When we say things like "nobody" we are insulting people we want in our coalition of good people. Unfortunately I don't have the money to do it, but if it were in my power I would buy up available AM stations and give them things they can connect with but without the hate and fear.

[EYESORE 9001]

8. I listen to the radio for 30 minutes twice daily on the way to and from work

I only have over-the-air radio, so it’s NPR, which is hardly a bastion of progressivism. I listen to SiriusXM Progress when I’m in the other vehicle. Yeah, if I were a media mogul, I’d go for it with radio too, avoiding the mistakes made by those who organized and financed Air America.

[Grins]

4. "...on fears that the U.S. could become what they left behind."

…broadcasters prey, unchallenged, on fears that the United States could become what they left behind.”

By building and supporting a copy of what they left behind.

Already happening effers; thanks to you.