Later this month the political media establishment will turn its focus to Florida, which will host a GOP presidential primary following the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
There will be two televised debates in the Sunshine State in the week leading up to January 31 vote (including one in Tampa on January 23), but originally there were three scheduled, with a January 29 debate to take place on the nation's largest Hispanic television network, Univision.
But that debate was canceled in late September after most of the presidential candidates, in expressing solidarity with Florida U.S. GOP Senator Marco Rubio, announced they would boycott the event, after reports surfaced that the network had allegedly tried to blackmail him regarding a controversial story about a relative.
As the Miami Herald's Marc Caputo and Manny Garcia originally reported on October 1, the Spanish language network "offered what sounded like a deal to the U.S. Senator's staff."
That deal would be that if Rubio appeared on the network's Sunday public affairs program Al Punto, a story its news team had been working on regarding a decades-old drug bust of Rubio's brother-in-law "would be softened or might not run at all."
That, the Herald reported, was according to "Univision insiders and the Republican senator's staff."
Univision executives immediately decried that report, but essentially it has never been effectively challenged, until the publication this week of a story by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta called "War of Choice."
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2011.