Monday, October 17, 2016

Miami Radio: Hispanic Media Covers This Crazy Election


In the present-day of South Florida’s Spanish-language TV and radio, a personal connection edges out political agendas. This more moderate, restrained tone is a radical departure from what Hispanic media in Miami used to be in the 1980s and ’90s: an often bitter landscape dominated by hardliners who raged at Castro’s regime and stoked public sentiment against anyone they deemed sympathetic to communist governments.

The Miami Herald reports today, though, Hispanic media have evolved and caught up with their English-language counterparts — not just in terms of professionalism, but also in importance and advertising. That sophistication is critical in earning the attention of U.S. Latinos, who account for 17.6 percent of the country’s inhabitants and wield 11.3 percent of its purchasing power. In 2015, overall spending on U.S. Hispanic media (including TV, radio, newspapers and magazines) totaled $7.83 billion.

But immigration — Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Syrian refugees, anti-Muslim sentiment — is a key factor in this year’s election.

Spanish-language talk radio in South Florida has transformed itself into a far more sophisticated and inviting arena than it was 20 years ago. According to a recent report by Nielsen Media Research, 97 percent of the nearly 57 million Hispanics in the U.S. tune in to radio every week, with nearly 10 percent of them listening to talk shows.

“Hispanic media in Miami went through a revolution after 2000,” says Dario Moreno, a political consultant and professor of political science at Florida International University. “First you had the consolidation of the old Spanish media, especially AM talk radio, under Univision. A lot of the decision-making authority was taken out of Miami and put into corporate, so radio now has a more corporate attitude.

An increasingly larger of the viewers and listeners are increasingly non-Cuban. News coverage is no longer Cuba-centric.

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