Miami Radio: Host Claims He Was Fired For Having A ‘Very Latino’ Show

Carlos Frias

A Miami journalist filed a federal complaint against his radio station this week, claiming that he and his team were let go after a series of discriminatory incidents, including a boss who allegedly said their show was “sounding very Latino.”

Last week, South Florida’s Non-Com WLRN 91.3 FM terminated Carlos Frías and two producers on his team and canceled “Sundial,” a 6-year-old show about local arts and culture that has been replaced with an extra hour of nationally syndicated programming.

WLRN is owned by Miami-Dade County Public Schools, according to The Washington Post.

The shake-up has caused a wave of upset from the Florida Keys to Miami to Palm Beach — a region where Frías, who is Cuban American, has been a longtime voice in the cultural scene. Some South Florida groups have voiced their opposition to the sunsetting of “Sundial” — including one anchor who reportedly quit the radio station in solidarity with Frías.

Station executives defended the cuts as a necessary trade-off. “The change was made to focus more resources on WLRN’s award-winning newsroom, mainly boosting news stories for daily newscasts and features, along with bolstering the expansion of digital stories,” WLRN’s vice president of news, Sergio Bustos, the station’s daily news and live programming director, Caitie Muñoz, and its vice president of radio, Peter Maerz, said in a statement.

Bustos said no one at the station was able to comment based on advice from legal counsel.

But Frías, who joined as the show’s host in 2022, said the “Sundial” team was let go about a week after he complained to human resources about racial discrimination, according to a filing he made jointly to the Florida Commission on Human Relations and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday.

William Amlong, one of Frías’s attorneys, called WLRN’s actions “abhorrent,” especially considering the large population of Cubans and other Hispanic people that live in Miami-Dade County, as seen in census data.

Frías alleges that Muñoz told a producer that the show was “sounding very Latino” last August, and made a spreadsheet of the show’s guests that only listed the ethnicity for Hispanic or Latino guests. The producer declined a request for comment, citing the ongoing legal proceedings.

The show has featured several Hispanic and Latino guests, including Puerto Rican artists and Cuban American authors. But Amlong argued that that’s to be expected in an area where Spanish and Spanish-language media is also widespread.