FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Novemeber 21, 2023
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists regrets the decision by Sinclair Broadcast Group station KUNS-TV to end its affiliation with Univision, which will leave the Seattle area’s growing Hispanic population without a source of national Spanish-language programming and cut off access to the region’s lone, locally produced TV newscast in Spanish.
Broadcasters need to make business decisions, but the growing market clout of Spanish-speaking and bilingual audiences is often overlooked. The Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area’s Hispanic population grew 174% to 451,948 from 2000 to 2022, according to Axios. Newscasts that inform and engage the whole community strengthen democracy.
“The lack of access to Spanish-language emergency information is an immediate concern, but the impact goes beyond that” said Dunia Elvir, NAHJ Spanish At Large Officer. “When a region loses Spanish programming, important communities lose an essential way to understand and connect with the society and economy of their adopted country, and become more vulnerable to misinformation.”
Latinos have grown to more than 19 percent of the U.S. population, and their collective purchasing power reached $3.4 trillion in 2021. While 72% speak English proficiently, a majority say they speak Spanish at home, and 28% say they are not fluent in English. Despite the size of the market, Spanish programing is often the first to go when news organizations scale back.
In the past year, the Washington Post cut its Spanish-language podcast and opinion section, the Dallas Morning News disbanded the staff of 18-year-old publication Al Dia and assigned them to other teams, and the LA Times announced deep cuts that disproportionately affected Latino journalists.
NAHJ hopes media companies will recognize that delivering news and information to America’s growing Latino population can be both a public service and business opportunity. Meanwhile, we send our support to Univision’s local journalists, among them NAHJ members, and underline how important it is for their voices to be heard and communities to be represented.
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About NAHJ:
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) is the largest organization of Latino journalists in the United States and is dedicated to the recognition and professional advancement of Hispanics in the news industry. Established in April 1984, NAHJ created a national voice and unified vision for all Hispanic journalists. The mission of NAHJ is to increase the number of Latinos in the newsrooms and to work toward fair and accurate representation of Latinos in news media. NAHJ has more than 3,500 members, including working journalists, journalism students, other media-related professionals and journalism educators. For more information please visit NAHJ.org or follow on Twitter @NAHJ.
Media Contact:
Andrew Sherry
asherry@nahj.org