WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2024 – The National Association of Hispanic Journalists regrets the decision by Sinclair Broadcast Group station to drop Univision from its Portland television station, less than a year after a similar move in Seattle.
KUNP-TV, Sinclair’s Portland Spanish-language television station, will drop its affiliation with Univision and switch to English-language news and sports programming in 2025. The move will leave the Portland area’s growing Hispanic population without a source of national Spanish-language news programming.
Sinclair will be broadcasting Portland Trail Blazers games on KUNP-TV, after recently acquiring rights from the NBA franchise.
“The civic value of Spanish-language broadcast news is inestimable in the Pacific Northwest, where Spanish-speakers have few sources of reliable information,” said NAHJ President Dunia Elvir. “Spanish programming provides immigrant communities with a way to understand and connect with the society and economy of their adopted country, and it curbs the spread of disinformation.”
“Broadcasters have to make business decisions, but they too often overlook the growing influence and buying power of the Hispanic community,” she added.
Oregon is home to 583,000 who identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 14% of the state’s population. Around 8% of the state’s population speaks Spanish at home.
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 November 2023, Sinclair’s Seattle station KUNS-TV decided to end its affiliation with Univision, leaving the 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.
In the past two years, 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
PREVIOUS STATEMENTS
https://nahj.org/nahj-regrets-sinclairs-decision-to-drop-seattle-areas-only-spanish-programing/
https://nahj.org/2023/02/15/nahj-stands-withaldia/
BACKGROUND
- https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/1/23856029/gizmodo-shuts-down-spanish-language-site-ai-translations
- https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/the-washington-post-has-cut-its-spanish-language-podcast-and-opinion-section-according-to-the-papers-latino-caucus/
- https://twitter.com/DallasNewsGuild/status/1623760495009271817?s=20&t=zVcHqWW2OUI3xY9b96fZwg and https://dallasnewsguild.org/news/after-19-years-spanish-language-newspaper-al-das-staff-is-disbanded
- In 2020, NBCUniversal laid off staff and canceled two of its three hour-long Spanish-language daily news programs on its Telemundo network.
- Also in 2020, BuzzFeed News eliminated its new division, including its Spanish-language news section.
- In 2019 Univision, the largest Spanish-broadcast network in the US, laid off up to 250 employees and announced plans to rely more on syndicated telenovelas rather than original programming.
- In 2019, Al Día, a Spanish-language newspaper serving Philadelphia’s Hispanic community, laid off its entire newsroom staff. The paper had been publishing for over four decades but faced financial pressures. This resulted in Al Día eliminating its daily print newspaper and switching to a weekly print edition. It also scaled back its digital news coverage.
- ESPN Deportes, the Spanish-language sister channel to ESPN, has reduced staff and shifted away from covering soccer and other international sports in recent years.
- Fox Sports laid off its entire writing staff for Fox Deportes website in 2018 as part of broader cuts at Fox Sports.
- In 2017, The Huffington Post eliminated its Spanish-language edition HuffPost Voces which had launched in 2012.
- The San Diego Union-Tribune discontinued its Spanish-language weekly newspaper Enlace in 2018.
The reasons given for these changes tend to relate to budget cuts, broader layoffs across parent companies, and shifting priorities away from Spanish-language content.