A Mexican-American radio analyst is no longer employed by the Carolina Panthers due to the NFL team’s objection to his pro-Trump social media presence.
Forty-two-year broadcaster Luis Moreno Jr. immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a teen and became a citizen this year. He said the team objected to his pro-Trump stances on Twitter and ultimately did not renew his contract after he refused to stop posting his support of the president on his personal accounts, according to Charlotte Observer.
“I don’t think that me showing support for the president of a country that I love — and that I just became a citizen of — should have a backlash to the point where now I am no longer a part of a great organization that I was with for 10 years, simply because my freedom of speech was too much for them,” Moreno Jr. said.
Moreno Jr., who established himself as a popular Spanish language broadcaster along with his radio partner and uncle for a decade, said the team approached him in the spring following a tweet supporting Trump. Team officials asked him to remove affiliations with the team from his personal account bios.
Moreno Jr. acquiesced to that demand and changed his bios to show that he’s a supporter of the president. The change prompted another call from the team asking to discuss his social media posts, to which the broadcaster responded, “If what they want me to do is stop supporting the president, I’m not gonna do that.”
Next, Moreno Jr. said he asked Eric Fiddleman, the radio and television affiliate manager for the Panthers, to have Steven Drummond, Panthers vice president of communications and external affairs, to call him. That request, as well as an email follow-up, was not responded to by Drummond.
“I’m hurt,” Moreno Jr. said. “Because this has nothing to do with my performance on-air. This has nothing to do with how good I am at what I do. I’m one of the best, and I’ll put myself against anybody in the country when it comes to what I do in Spanish. None of my support for the president was done on any of their social media pages, it was never done on any of the airtime — whether it was a podcast or a broadcast or anything related to the Panthers. This was solely on my personal time on my personal accounts.”
Moreno Jr.’s contract was not picked up for the 2020 season, and a replacement manned his position in the radio booth for the Panthers first regular season game this past weekend.
