Soon after my story appeared in Huffington Post Politics that the infamous 28 May 2009 'Promesa de Obama' interview with President Obama on Univision's Al Punto con Jorge Ramos had disappeared from YouTube's search indices, Univision.com's Director de Noticias Manuel Aguilera tweeted a link to Spanish-language transcript of an English-language interview with President Obama posted on Univision.com on 9 September 2009. Embedded alongside the interview transcript is a video of the interview, overdubbed in Spanish, in which Jorge Ramos interviews President Obama about the progress of the healthcare reform bill which, at the time, was stalled in Congress. In the interview, Ramos asks President Obama about the how the healthcare reform bill will relate to undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Ramos also asks Obama about 'la promesa de Obama'.
From President Obama's 2nd interview:
RAMOS: OK, so. But what I wanted to ask you is about what Latino's call, "la promesa de Obama - Obama's promise." On May 28th you told me, and I am quoting, "what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support." And then I asked again, "in the first year?" And you said, "Yes, in the first year." This is your promise and the question that many of them have is, are you going to keep your promise. Can you do it before January 20th?
The question of how President Obama's 1st Al Punto interview with Ramos disappeared from YouTube remains unanswered. Further, Google News Searches 'Barack Obama Jorge Ramos' between the dates 28 and 29 May 2009 also come up empty.
I asked Aguilera via direct message on Twitter to comment on the removal of 'la promesa de Obama' interviews from YouTube's search indices. He assured me, in Spanish, that the decision (presumably, to have remove the video) was not editorial. I asked Aguilera if the video was removed from YouTube in order to headline with healthcare reform.
"No," Aguilera replied, in Spanish. "If the video has disappeared it would have been for technical reasons and not editorial."
YouTube does not comment on individual videos. However, Abbi Tatton, Google's Manager of Global Communications and Public Affairs notes via email that "when a video is removed from YouTube a message is displayed at the URL explaining why it's no longer there."
Google's BlogSearch index for the query 'Jorge Ramos Barack Obama' filtered to search the dates 28 and 29 May 2009 are considerably more populated than the news search, but so far I find no YouTube URL from which an explanation may be gleaned. Univision's Aguilera would not comment on the nature the technical reasons that removed 'la promesa de Obama' from all of YouTube's search indices. Thus, the apparent Internet-wide disappearance of President Obama's 1st interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos remain for now a mystery.