February 10, 2023

By Bill Berkowitz

There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of Americano Media. There’s a good chance that in the lead up to the 2024 election you will be hearing about, and from, Americano Media! A late January Politico piece on the enterprise was headlined “‘Fox News in Spanish’: Inside an upstart media company’s big plans to impact the 2024 election.” Media Matters for America headlined its story, “Americano Media wants to be the Spanish-language Fox News. Here’s what you need to know about it.”

In the past few election cycles, the Republican Party has fared far better with the Hispanic community than pundits and Democrats expected. After the midterm election, a CNN exit poll data found that Democrats’ lead with Latino voters has narrowed by nearly 10 percentage points since the 2018 midterm election, with 60 percent supporting House Democratic candidates and 39 percent GOP.

So what is Americano Media, and what are its intentions?

According to Media Matters’ Leo Fernandez, “Since Americano Media’s inception, the network has provided right-wing radio programming for Spanish-speaking audiences with notable hosts who reliably spread misinformation and extremism. This includes right-wing narratives disparaging immigrants, undermining the results of Democratic elections, attacking the LGBTQ community, and spreading conspiracy theories – including the deeply racist Great Replacement theory, which posits that white people and ‘legacy Americans’ are being deliberately replaced through mass migration from non-white countries.”

“We don’t have a Fox News in Spanish, and that’s what Americano intends to be,” said the network’s CEO and founder Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, who worked on Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Over the past year Americano Media aired live from CPAC Dallas;  set up a massive booth on radio row at Turning Point’s AmericaFest; and has interviewed Donald Trump and several top elected Republicans, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mike Lee (Utah), and Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Steve Saclise (La.), along with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

According to Politico’s Natalie Allison, “Americano Media, which launched in March, is embarking on an aggressive expansion plan to shape center-right Hispanic opinion during the upcoming election cycle. The network has hired more than 80 Latino journalists and producers, are expanding their radio presence to television, and by the end of the year will have studios in Miami, Las Vegas and D.C. with reporters covering the White House, Congress and embedding in 2024 presidential campaigns. This month, Americano is launching a $20 million marketing campaign to draw in new viewers.”

The company “started with a suite of radio shows out of Miami, where it remains headquartered, but plans to have a presence on television and radio in battleground states across America in the next year, in addition to driving Spanish-speaking audiences to its online and streaming platforms,” Allison reported.

Thus far, according to Allison, the company “has raised $18 million from its first three investors, and is set to complete its first and only round of equity investment this spring to generate another $30 to $50 million, Garcia-Hidalgo said.” Two of the investors are Thomas Woolston, a northern Virginia patent attorney, and Doug Hayden, a San Jose, Calif.-based investor. Americano did not reveal the name of the third investor.

Top executives for the company include “Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP operative who advised Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and briefly served as an official at the Department of Health and Human Services at the start of the Covid pandemic, and Alfonso Aguilar, who led George W. Bush’s citizenship office, is serving as Americano’s political director,” Allison reported.

Predictably, while Americano Media invades Hispanic communities around the country hunting listeners and potential Republican Party voters, Democrats appear to be stuck.  “There is an information war in Latino and bilingual communities in this country,” Tara McGowan, the founder and publisher of the Democratic-aligned Courier Newsroom network, who has been vocal about the left needing to build new, progressive media outlets, told Politico. “It’s a very smart and very alarming move by conservatives to double down on their investment in Americano Media.”