Former President Donald Trump‘s Univision town hall was a failed “propaganda project,” according to Joaquin Blaya, the network’s former president.
In an effort to appeal to a potentially crucial voting bloc in this year’s presidential election, the former president on Wednesday fielded several questions from undecided Hispanic voters at the Univision event in Florida.
Trump struggled to answer tough questions during the town hall and repeated several falsehoods throughout the event, with video clips of seemingly unimpressed audience members quickly going viral on social media.
During a Thursday morning interview on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe, Blaya blasted his former network for displaying a lack of “integrity” by allowing Trump to speak uninterrupted without fact-checking any of the false claims that he made.
Former President Donald Trump is pictured during a Univision town hall event in Doral, Florida, on October 16. Former Univision President Joaquin Blaya blasted the network on Thursday for presenting what he called an “infomercial” for Trump.
Joe Raedle
“It was really not a town hall, it was an infomercial in where they brought in audience as props,” Blaya said. “They did ask tough questions, but of course he went on to recite his concert of lies without any journalism integrity on the part of the network, without any fact-checking.”
“Univision did not distinguish themselves as being a true news organization and served as a platform for close to an hour of [Trump’s] continuing recital of lies,” he added.
Blaya went on to argue that Univision’s town hall was a “propaganda project” in part because it was moderated by Mexican journalist Enrique Acevedo instead of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos.
“The main anchor of the Univision network is Jorge Ramos, one of the most respected journalists in America,” Blaya said. “If the network was serious about conducting this in a journalistic manner, you would have thought that Jorge would have to be the person doing the interview and the town hall.”
“Yet, they again decided to put on someone who they brought from Mexico, and the results are what you saw last night,” he continued. “Where they allow Trump to go freely [presenting] his traditional list of lies.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to Univision and the Trump campaign via email on Thursday.
Acevedo previously faced heavy criticism for his Univision interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November. Critics accused him of allowing Trump to lie unchecked during the interview and called for a boycott of Univision.
Vice President Kamala Harris participated in her own Univision town hall event last week. The event, which the Trump campaign criticized as a display of “non-sensical word salads” by the vice president, was also moderated by Acevedo.
Polls suggest that Hispanic voters have shifted slightly toward Trump and Republicans in recent years, although Harris continues to maintain a solid lead over the former president in the demographic in most recent polls.
A poll released earlier this week by the Hispanic Federation and Latino Victory Foundation found that Harris had a massive 28 point lead over Trump among Hispanics in the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
