You can't always identify a media organization's bias based solely on what they say. As this story proves, what a news organization keeps quite about can often be just as important, if not more so.
Here's how Univision blithely refrained from covering the jihadi nature of the terrorist threat that was made just prior to a recent Ariana Grande concert in Costa Rica:
MARIA ELENA SALINAS, NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: A 22-year-old Colombian was arrested in Costa Rica for having threatened to carry out a terrorist attack in a concert by American singer Ariana Grande. The threat took place following an attack on the artist's concert in Manchester, England, that took the lives of 22 people. Grande's concert last Sunday in Costa Rica took place, nevertheless, without incident.
What kind of terroristic threat was this, in tranquil Costa Rica, of all places? Univision didn't specify, leading viewers to wonder...was this some sort of Marxist group like Peru's Shining Path or Colombia's FARC? Or could jihadism have been a motive? The Daily Mail actually had the full story:
Detectives launched a manhunt on Saturday after threatening messages were posted in Arabic on a webpage of the concert organisers.
The suspect, with the last names Caicedo Lopez, a 22-year-old from Colombia, was held in a 6am raid on his flat in Tibas, near the capital San Jose, yesterday.
Officers seized two mobile phones allegedly used to make the threats.
So concerned were the concert organizers that they reinforced security, making concertgoers go through three rings of security checks despite the fact that the man making the threats had already been placed in custody.
It was dangerous and reckless of Univision to omit this information from their viewers, furthering the false notion that jihadi terror attacks such as those carried out in London and Manchester can't or don't happen in Latin America.
Viewers deserve to know that someone tried to evoke Manchester much closer to home, in a very real and terrifying way. And it is sad to see the nation's leading Spanish-language newscast suppress a salient bit of news rather than tell the full story.
Univision's viewers deserve better.
