Spanish-language Television Research Articles

Communication Policy to Reduce Health Disparities: A Cross-Language Content Analysis of YouTube Television Advertising

IntroductionThis study aimed to identify disparate health-related marketing across English- and Spanish-language television networks in New York City (NYC), ultimately to inform policy that can counteract disproportionate health-related marketing that provides harmful content to, and withholds beneficial information from, Latinx populations. MethodsA two-week composite sample of primetime English-language (NBC and CBS) and Spanish-language (Telemundo and Univision) television networks from YouTube TV was randomly drawn from September 7-27, 2022 in NYC. A total of 9,314 health-related television advertisements were identified for systematic media content analysis and coded into categories: alcohol, core or noncore foods/beverages, mental health/tobacco prevention, health insurance, medical centers, and pharmaceuticals. Analyses conducted in 2022-2024 included intercoder reliability, and descriptive and rate difference estimates using total advertisement broadcasting time in the full sample and sub-samples by language networks on YouTube TV. ResultsCompared to NYC primetime English-television networks, Spanish-television networks broadcasted greater health-adverse advertisements per hour for alcohol (Rate Difference [RD]=4.91; 95%CI=3.96,5.85) and noncore foods/beverages (RD=13.43; 95%CI=11.52,15.34), and fewer health-beneficial advertisements per hour for mental health/tobacco prevention (RD=-0.99; 95%CI=-1.45,-0.54), health insurance (RD=-1.00; 95%CI=-1.44,-0.57), medical centers (RD=-0.55; 95%CI=-1.23, 0.12), and pharmaceuticals (RD=-5.72; 95%CI=-7.32,-4.11). ConclusionsMulti-level policy innovation and implementation is required to mitigate primetime television marketing strategies that contribute to health inequities.

“Dangerous in the Minds of Barrio People”: Empowering Bicultural Latino Identity on Spanish-Language Television in Los Angeles, 1960–1990

Abstract This article focuses on the bicultural Latino identity-building discourses promoted by TV stations KMEX Channel 34 (Spanish International Network/Univision) and KVEA Channel 52 (Telemundo) through news and public affairs programming in metropolitan Los Angeles, home of the United States’s largest concentration of Latinas and Latinos. The two stations’ news and public affairs shows are historically significant for being their most extensive locally produced content and offering a valuable audio/visual representation of Latino Southern California’s cultural development from the early 1960s to late 1980s. Both stations reflected their social context, broadcasting to an overwhelmingly Mexican-heritage audience; but producers and investors at KMEX-34 and KVEA-52 also consciously sought a wider Spanish-speaking audience in Southern California by framing viewers as politically empowered bicultural U.S. Latino subjects defined by a positive affirmation of their cultural background (broadly inclusive of all of Latin America) and their integration into U.S. life through participation in electoral politics and other civic processes. Combining archival research consisting of early scripts, office memoranda, program reviews, viewer letters, oral history interviews, and analysis of extant video recordings preserved in the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s News and Public Affairs Collection, I historicize the ways locally produced programming on Spanish-language TV framed and promoted notions of an additive and empowering bicultural U.S. Latino identity.

Spanish-Language Television and Diaspora in Detroit and Los Angeles: Toward Latinx Media Enfranchisement

Spanish-language media have often been portrayed as catering to a “niche” market, because of presumed ethnic specificity and issues of linguistic proficiency and preference. Constructed as such, these media are seldom considered in the mainstream as having an impact on social incorporation, and media and opinions in the larger U.S. public sphere. Based on field research conducted in Detroit and Los Angeles, this article challenges such notions, showing how Spanish-language television, when utilized as a place-making tool as well as a source of local and national information, can contribute to viewers’ resilience, sense of self, and sociopolitical expression through media enfranchisement. In contrast to other studies that emphasize textual analysis or media enterprises in the aggregate, this article takes a meso-level approach, focusing on the differences made for Latinx communities by innovation in media access, reception strategies, and outreach by media professionals, along with the qualitative improvement of audiovisual representation.

Amazing Grace Keeps the Platters Spinning

In this photo essay, we center Chicana radio and television broadcasting trailblazer Graciela Gil Olivarez who, with a microphone in hand, amplified Mexicana and Chicana voices and stories across the Southwest from 1951 to the mid-1960s and again in the 1980s. Olivarez bridged her broadcasting work with an impressive career in government organizations that made her the highest-ranking Latina during President Jimmy Carter’s term. Through a series of photographs of Olivarez’s life and career trajectory, we mark the place of the first woman disc jockey in Phoenix, Arizona, and later owner of her own Spanish-language television network, KLUZ, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a key figure in Latina media histories. This photo essay mines the visual archive—photographs that span Olivarez’s early career in radio and television broadcasting and subsequent political work—in order to establish how Chicanas innovated media production to center their voices and narratives.

Whitewashing diverse voices: (de)constructing race and ethnicity in Spanish-language television dubbing

When television programs are translated for global audiences, languages are changed, but so too are constructions of diverse identities. Characters who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) undergo transformations in order to be intelligible outside of their original national contexts; such transformations might reinforce these characters’ difference or eliminate it, effectively whitewashing BIPOC voices. This article unpacks this phenomenon by investigating the translation of diverse characters through the lens of the many industrial norms and constraints that shape the dubbing industry. Using the international Fox hit Glee (2009–2015) as an entry point for exploring the role of dubbing in Latin America, this study complicates conventional notions about global media’s imperialist and hybridizing implications by tracing political economy and industrial practices onto the dubbing of Black, Latinx, and Asian television characters.

Univision, Telemundo and the Rise of Spanish-language Television in the United States by Craig Allen

Univision, Telemundo and the Rise of Spanish-language Television in the United States by Craig Allen

The cost of an outdated strategy: The case of US Hispanic marketing

Significant shifts in the US demographic landscape over the last 20 years have transformed the face of marketing. Yet, for more than three decades, marketing to US Hispanics has undergone little change, with Spanish-language television continuing to represent the bulk of media spend. This paper provides a brief summary of the ‘nativitybased view’ (NBV) — a new methodology that recognises that US and foreign-born Hispanics are not homogeneous in what they watch on television; rather, nativity is a more effective variable than language in targeting and measuring the changing US Hispanic television audience — particularly Hispanic millennials.

Disruption and continuity on telenovela with the surge of a new hybrid prime-time fictional serial: The super series

The Latin American telenovela genre has enjoyed a long-lasting hegemonic position in prime-time television across the region, and particularly within US Spanish-language television market. However, in the last several years, Spanish-language national television networks, as well as their prime-time telenovela product, are being challenged by the new digital and mobile media landscape. Television networks have deployed a variety of strategies to better accommodate to new audiences’ consumption routines in a digital age. This article focuses on a particular moment of disruption – and continuity –, which has been a game changer for US Hispanic television and has transformed the face of fictional serial (telenovelas) in prime time. The surge in popularity of a telenovela subgenre originating in Colombia and widely adopted by US television corporations, known as narconovela, has transformed the telenovela genre/format, prompting industry professionals to initiate new institutional discourses aimed to mark these texts as super series, and in doing so labelling them as a new type of genre. Super series are an excellent case study for understanding the dialectic notion of disruption and continuity both in television studies and the television industry.

Book Review: Spanish-Language Television in the United States: Fifty Years of Development by Kenton T. Wilkinson

Book Review: <i>Spanish-Language Television in the United States: Fifty Years of Development</i> by Kenton T. Wilkinson

Nativity-based view: A new audience measurement standard that drives television return on investment for US Hispanics

Significant shifts in the US demographic landscape combined with the rise of digital media over the last 20 years have transformed the face of marketing. Yet, for more than three decades, marketing to US Hispanics has undergone little change, with Spanish-language television continuing to represent the bulk of US Hispanic media spend. This study investigates whether there is a better way to drive television return on investment (ROI) with Hispanics at a time when television viewership is declining and digital and social media usage is almost ubiquitous among Hispanics. The paper advances the ‘Nativity-Based View’ (NBV), a new methodology which proposes that nativity is an effective variable in targeting and measuring the changing US Hispanic television audience, and applies this model across three business categories to measure its effectiveness in a real marketing context. The results of the first test show that US and foreign-born Hispanics are not homogeneous in what they watch on television, suggesting that Spanish-language television is not the ‘best way’ to target US Hispanics. The second test couples nativity with age, and finds that approximately 73–79 per cent of Spanish-language television does not reach Hispanic millennials, suggesting that the NBV is a valuable planning and investment tool in targeting key segments of the Hispanic population. The paper discusses the implications of the NBV, and encourages brands and advertising agencies to adopt a new tool to drive television ROI for US Hispanics.

The Latino/a audience unbound: Intra-ethnic social hierarchies and Spanish-language television news

Many US Spanish-language television producers, marketers and academics construct Latino/a identity in Spanish-language media narrowly, despite numerous scholarly critiques of the pan-Latino label. Examining how Latino/a immigrants in metropolitan Miami interpret representations of immigrants, immigrant communities, and urban services in Spanish-language news, I argue that diverse Latino/a audiences emerge according to how the media representations evoke participants’ subjective positioning in locally and nationally embedded social hierarchies. The study reveals how intra-Latino/a factors affect audience formation, and discusses implications for audience studies and journalism practice.

Evaluating Health Storytelling in Spanish-Language Television from a Communication Infrastructure Theory Perspective

Latinos are at high risk for many health problems, yet they are often missed by traditional health communication campaigns that tend to deploy messages through general audience channels. New immigrant Latinos living in Los Angeles indicate a strong connection to Spanish-language television for health and medical information, but the quantity and quality of health information provided through such programming has not been systematically evaluated. Grounded in communication infrastructure theory, a content analysis of Spanish-language television news and talk shows was conducted to examine the nature of health coverage. As a primary health source for the Los Angeles Latino community, Spanish-language television could serve an important role in helping Latinos overcome health disparities by connecting them to a health storytelling network. However, findings show that the programs analyzed do not adequately connect viewers to other health storytellers or personalize information in such a way that may prompt interpersonal discussion and the dissemination of health information.

Pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising and US Hispanic patient-consumers.

Hispanic Americans use prescription medications at markedly lower rates than do non-Hispanic whites. At the same time, Hispanics are the largest racial-ethnic minority in the USA. In a recent effort to reach this underdeveloped market, the pharmaceutical industry has begun to create Spanish-language direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) campaigns. The substantive content of these campaigns is being tailored to appeal to the purported cultural values, beliefs and identities of Latino consumers. We compare English-language and Spanish-language television commercials for two prescription medications. We highlight the importance of selling medicine to a medically under-served population as a key marketing element of Latino-targeted DTCA. We define selling medicine as the pharmaceutical industry's explicit promotion of medicine's cultural authority as a means of expanding its markets and profits. We reflect on the prospects of this development in terms of promoting medicalisation in a US subgroup that has heretofore eluded the pharmaceutical industry's marketing influence. Our analysis draws on Nikolas Rose's insights concerning variations in the degree to which certain groups of people are more medically made up than others, by reflecting on the racial and ethnic character of medicalisation in the USA and the role DTCA plays in shaping medicalisation trends. A video abstract of this article can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZabCle9-jHw&feature=youtu.be.

Paradigm shift: The effect of nativity and years-in-country on television programme viewing across three Hispanic generational levels

US Spanish-language television was an estimated US$6.1bn industry in 2013 and has more than tripled since 2003. Marketing has changed dramatically during this time with digital and social media revolutionising the industry with improved metrics and real-time analytics. Unfortunately, television measurement of the US Hispanic population has not changed significantly in more than two decades, has relied on ‘language’ as its sole metric during this time, and has not kept up with the full diversity of the changing Hispanic population. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are better and more efficient ways to measure the US Hispanic television audience, which would help leading corporations optimise their media investments. By way of a quantitative primary study, this paper advances two variables — nativity and years-incountry — which we propose are more effective and efficient in targeting Hispanics than language alone. We hope this initial study will spur innovation and an open discussion on new ways to measure the US Hispanic television audience and help corporations drive media efficiency and target effectiveness. Although this study focused on US Hispanics, there is an opportunity to test and apply the findings across other multicultural groups in the USA and abroad.

U.S. Spanish-Language Television Management during the Industry’s First 50 Years

Many people were stunned to learn the Spanish-language television network Univision was the highest rated in prime time among all U.S. networks in July 2013, a feat it repeated a year later. Steady growth of its demographic and advertising bases, combined with astute management, has brought success to this dynamic industry sector. However, the boom years were preceded by several decades of formidable challenges and lean periods. This article exa mines the principal technological, programming, financial and competitive obstacles network management faced from the 1970s to the 2000s, illustrating the variety of fronts on which ethnic-oriented media leaders maneuvered during a period of rapid population growth and industry transformation.

Making gender relevant in Spanish-language sports broadcast discourse

Using the US Spanish-language television broadcasts of the FIFA Women’s World Cup soccer (football) tournament, the present study offers an analysis of the crucial role that language plays in the gendering of sport. Despite the framing of the coverage as a celebration of women’s participation in sports, this was undermined by the sometimes covert, sometimes overt, objectification, trivialization and patronizing of the players and their sport during the broadcast. We examine the ground-level interactional practices through which this marginalization was achieved. First we consider references to persons, presenting overarching quantitative distributions as well as contextualized examples. We then highlight how gender is brought to the interactional surface and made relevant – to the speakers themselves and to the at-home audience – through the discursive dichotomization of women’s versus men’s soccer, with particular attention to the ways in which topicalization of gender-based differences can pave the way for the recreation of gender-based inequalities. Finally, we illustrate how gendering soccer reflects and transcends the game itself, invoking and reestablishing normative gender roles and expectations in and from society.

Making Hispanics: how activists, bureaucrats, and media constructed a new American

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as Hispanics and Latinos in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category-and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation. Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as white, grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as under-represented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 18: Media ed. by Alison Graham and Sharon Monteith (review)

Reviewed by: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 18: Media ed. by Alison Graham and Sharon Monteith Blake Scott Ball The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 18: Media. Alison Graham and Sharon Monteith, eds. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xx, 439 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-0-8078-3491-6. This volume on media and southern culture is a splendid addition to the long-running reference series sponsored by the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture under the general editorship of Charles Reagan Wilson. Volume editors Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith have assembled a rich collection of articles and encyclopedia entries covering what they term “mass media,” including film, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, photojournalism, and the Internet. This collection looks to outline the ways that southerners and non-southerners have employed southern history, manners, and myths through a variety of mediums to define and maintain the existence of a culturally distinct region, as well as the ways that this distinct culture has shaped the broader national culture. The result is a strikingly comprehensive book on a virtually inexhaustible topic. The breadth of topics covered in this volume is truly delightful for anyone interested in Southern culture. An entry on comic strips traces the development of southern characters drawn by artists outside the region who tended to play on hillbilly stereotypes. Another entry on Internet representations of the South demonstrates that rather than dissolving the boundaries of regionalism, the author argues that it has become a new venue to debate what he calls the “Virtual South.” There are articles on southern accents in American media, the influence of Atlanta-based CNN, and segregationists’ use of media during the Civil Rights era. The editors also include entries on Spanish-language newspapers and radio, though they have noticeably neglected the impressive rise of Spanish-language television. The end result of this work is a broadened, updated, and complicated New South seen through the lens of hard and digital media. Entries include a number of Alabama-related topics such as actress Tallulah Bankhead, novelist Truman Capote, the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and media representations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Each [End Page 205] entry provides plenty of detail without becoming bogged down in minutia. These entries also position these Alabama history topics in the broader contexts of the South and the nation. With interest growing in the topic, it is curious that the editors did not include an entry on the southern rock genre and Alabama’s considerable contributions to it. Among the volume’s weaknesses is an overreliance upon technical jargon. Lay readers and undergraduates may find the authors’ lengthy introduction confusing because of the overuse of unfamiliar film history and visual culture terms. Fortunately, most of the encyclopedia entries do not suffer from the same vocabulary problems. Most readers will find this volume’s entries highly readable, understandable, and valuable. This book will be useful for anyone looking to understand the numerous competing images of the South in modern American culture. [End Page 206] Blake Scott Ball The University of Alabama Copyright © 2014 Alabama Historical Association

Reglocalization and the rise of the network cities media system in producing telenovelas for hemispheric audiences

In the context of a new economy and the new international cultural division of labor, we must recognize emerging globalization processes, triggered by the rise of a network cities media system in telenovela production comprising by the axis of Miami, Bogota, Mexico. This system has created an economic-socio-cultural production template I term reglocalization within the Spanish-language television industry. Reglocalization is a process through which Latinidad is re-crafted for regional/global consumption, through notions of traveling narratives, multinational settings, and multicultural castings, and transnational co-production agreements in which local entities produce a hybrid version of the region that includes a commodified production of a hemispheric Latinidad for global consumption.

Amount of Hispanic Youth Exposure to Food and Beverage Advertising on Spanish- and English-Language Television

Exposure to large numbers of television advertisements for foods and beverages with little or no nutritional value likely contributes to poor diet among youth. Given higher rates of obesity and overweight for Hispanic youth, it is important to understand the amount and types of food advertising they view. To quantify the amount of food and beverage advertising viewed by Hispanic youth on Spanish- and English-language television and compare it with the amount of food and beverage advertising viewed by non-Hispanic youth. Data on gross rating points that measured advertising viewed on national broadcast and cable television in 2010 using a Nielsen panel of television-viewing households of Hispanic and non-Hispanic preschoolers (2-5 years), children (6-11 years), and adolescents (12-17 years). Food and beverage television advertisements viewed on English- and Spanish-language television by product category and television-viewing times by age and language preference. EXPOSURE Food and beverage advertising on Spanish- and English-language television. RESULTS In 2010, Hispanic preschoolers, children, and adolescents viewed, on average, 11.6 to 12.4 television food ads per day; the majority of these ads (75%-85%) appeared on English-language television. Fast food represented a higher proportion of food ads on Spanish-language television. Consistent with television-viewing patterns, Hispanic preschoolers saw more Spanish-language food advertisements than did Hispanic children and adolescents. Owing to somewhat less food advertising on Spanish-language television, Hispanic children and adolescents viewed 14% and 24% fewer food ads overall, respectively, compared with non-Hispanic youth. Spanish-language television viewing was highly concentrated among youth who primarily speak Spanish. Both Hispanic and non-Hispanic youth view large numbers of television advertisements for nutrient-poor categories of food and beverage. Although Hispanic children and adolescents see somewhat fewer of these ads, the higher obesity rates among Hispanic youth, the greater exposure by Hispanic preschoolers, and the potential enhanced effects of targeted advertising on Hispanic youth suggest that this exposure may pose additional risks for Hispanic youth. Continued monitoring is warranted owing to food companies' stated intentions to increase marketing to Hispanics.