Hispanic lawmakers hoped a meeting with top executives from MSNBC and NBC News Wednesday would smooth over hard feelings from Donald Trump’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” Instead, it had the opposite effect.

NBC News President Deborah Turness committed a major blunder — as far as the Hispanic lawmakers were concerned — when she described undocumented immigrants as “illegals," a term that many in the Latino community find highly offensive.


Turness was describing NBC's integration with their Spanish-language network Telemundo, which included coverage of Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. and his interaction with a young girl who was afraid her parents would be deported because they’re “illegals.”

“I’m going to stop you right there. We use the term undocumented immigrants,” Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) interrupted.

Turness apologized.

That exchange kicked off a meeting that was already expected to be tense. Lawmakers were hoping for an explanation of why Trump hosted Saturday Night Live, despite formal protests from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. MSNBC and NBC News executives — who are part of a separate entity from NBC's entertainment division, which oversees SNL — came expecting to talk about the progress they've made in making their newsrooms more diverse.

Vargas later told POLITICO, “She was saying how they’ve done all these great things and then boom, she said ‘illegals.’”

It only got worse from there. Turness at one point spoke Spanish in an effort to show she understood and respected how important the issues discussed were to the Hispanic lawmakers.



“We love the Hispanic community...Yo hablo español,” Turness said, according to lawmakers present.



But that didn't go over well with lawmakers, some of whom left irate. Six Hispanic Caucus members and additional aides who were in the meeting said the members came to the meeting wanting NBC executives to address diversity hiring and the Trump appearance.

But the NBC officials said they were not in position to discuss Trump's SNL appearance because they represented the news side of NBC. That prompted the lawmakers to question why NBC didn't make more of an effort to bring someone who could.



“There was a lot of frustration in the room,” said Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.). “You know that (Trump is) an issue on all of our minds and as soon as you start talking about it, you say none of the executives for the entertainment (division) are here. It was a cop out. It was disingenuous.”

Cárdenas argued that if Trump — who has made a series of remarks about Hispanic immigrants, including calling them "rapists" — said similar things about African-Americans or Jews, NBC would not have had him on the show.



The meeting “was about them sitting down with the Hispanic caucus for the sake of saying they met with us,” said Cárdenas, who was a leading voice against the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. “Like that is progress.”

NBC officials did discuss their diversity efforts during the meeting, noting that the company has added more Hispanic correspondents to “NBC Nightly News.” They also touted news that Jose Diaz-Balart, an MSNBC and Telemundo host, will officially become a rotating anchor on the Saturday edition of “Nightly News” and will be a regular contributor to “Meet the Press." That part was well received, according to a source familiar with the meeting.

An NBC spokesperson said the meeting was "an open and respectful dialogue about the progress that’s been made on diversity both in front of and behind the camera in the news division."

The gathering was part of a larger effort between Comcast Corporation, NBC Universal and the Hispanic Leadership Organization. The three organizations have a "memorandum of understanding" that says Comcast and NBCU will make serious efforts to diversify its staff.





The agreement dictates that Comcast will establish "diversity advisory councils" and appoint Hispanics to its board of directors. The Hispanic Caucus has been pushing Comcast — which attempted unsuccessfully to merge with Time Warner Cable last year, a move that was opposed by many Latino lawmakers — to hire more people of color for on- and off-air positions.

The executives present at the meeting included Turness; Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC; Craig Robinson, the chief diversity officer for NBCUniversal; Joanne O’Brien, a senior vice president of Human Resources at NBCUniversal; and Ken Strickland, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News.

Sources said NBC officials were told before the Wednesday meeting that Trump's SNL appearance was at the top of lawmakers’ concerns to discuss.

Members of the Hispanic caucus have asked NBC for a second meeting with members of the entertainment division to discuss Trump’s appearance on SNL.

“Members left more offended and more upset then when they walked in there. There was major 'Hispandering,'” said a Democratic staffer. “There is definitely hurt there.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Janelle Rodriguez, a senior vice president with NBC News, and Yvette Miley, an executive editor of MSNBC, attended the meeting. They were expected by the CHC to attend but did not.

