Miami Spanish-language TV station to be sold for $64 million — and there might be on-air changes
Spanish Broadcasting System, which describes itself as the country’s largest Hispanic-controlled publicly traded media company, has agreed to sell its Mega TV division to a new Texas group whose founders say their mission is to promote conservative politics and “family values.”
The $64 million sale agreement, announced Monday by SBS, is the latest ownership change in a fast-changing Spanishlanguage media landscape in South Florida. The sale is subject to Federal Communications Commission approval. SBS will retain its core radio division, which focuses mainly on music and entertainment and includes Miami FM station El Zol, as well as its liveevents division. No personnel changes were disclosed.
Mega TV broadcasts a mix of entertainment, news and mainstream conservative-leaning political commentary programs from a studio in the Miami-Dade County municipality of
Medley.
Its best-known star is talk-show host Jaime Bayly, though it’s also known as the longtime TV home of veteran journalists and commentators Oscar Haza and Pedro Sevcec. Former Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado, a veteran radio journalist, hosts a current-affairs program on weekends.
The announcement does not address whether the new owners plan to alter Mega TV’s programming, which has seen few big changes in recent years. But past statements by the buyers suggest they would move the television station farther to the right.
The buyer, Dallas-based Voz Media, is a year-old startup whose founders say they want to “bring morality” to U.S. Spanishlanguage media and act as a counter to a U.S. Spanishlanguage news and media landscape that they contend has a strong liberal bias.
“The Spanish language media is even more biased than the already legendarily biased mainstream media, and something has to be done about this for the good of our community and for the good of our counMiami-based try,” Voz Media Chief Operating Officer Pablo Kleinman told an online publication in Dallas last year.
Founding CEO Orlando Salazar, who says on his Facebook page he’s vice chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, told the Dallas Express that Voz Media’s aim is to be “the opposite” of the two dominant media groups, Univision and Telemundo, both based in the Miami area.
“The opposite, absolutely, 100%, because they carry the water for the left, they’re just like NBC, ABC, CBS,” Salazar was quoted as saying. “So, we’re going to tell the truth.”
Salazar, who said he was told by God to start Voz Media, says his goal is to overtake his two giant rivals. “Success is we make money, and we make money for our investors, and we increase the number of viewers that we start overtaking the other networks like Univision and Telemundo,” he said.
The Mega TV purchase comes as Miami’s Spanishlanguage media landscape, long dominated by conservative and far-right voices, shifts significantly, raising the ideological stakes as the Republican Party seeks to expand its support among Hispanic Americans and immigrants in South Florida.
The Republican push has coincided with what many critics say is a rise in rightwing disinformation broadcast on local Spanish-language radio programs and, increasingly, on socialmedia channels. A Miami Herald special project that monitored leading radio programs and social-media influencers during the campaign season concluded in December that the content they produce is often rife with inaccuracies and misinformation.
Conservatives in Miami have decried the sale of TelevisaUnivision’s 18 Spanish-language radio stations, which include some traditionally far-right news and commentary outlets such as Miami’s Radio Mambi, to a new media company that includes some prominent liberal activists and investors as well as GOP figures.
In November, the Federal Communications Commission
approved the sale of the TelevisaUnivision stations to the Latino Media Network, a newly formed media company that includes among its investors the billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of Republican attacks, often anti-Semitic in nature, for his support of liberal causes.
Longtime Radio Mambi commentators have left the station, although the new owners have not said what changes they will institute. Conservatives claim the new owners will tilt programming in a more-liberal direction.
At the same time, Salem Media Group, a company that is linked to the Christian right and owns dozens of conservative and Christian radio stations and publications, announced in October that it had agreed to purchase Miami radio stations WWFE La Poderosa 670 AM and WRHC Cadena Azul 1550 AM, both longtime Spanishlanguage conservative outlets. A La Poderosa spokesman said at the time that the new owners did not plan any programming changes.
A month before the Salem deal, radio-station group Audacy announced it had struck a deal to broadcast conservative Spanishlanguage media startup Americano Media’s Radio Libre on WAXY-790 AM. Americano executives have said their goal is to promote conservative politics and help get GOP candidates elected.
On its website, SBS says Mega TV and independently owned affiliates reach 10 million Hispanic households in the United States and Puerto Rico. In Miami, Mega TV broadcasts over SBS-owned WSBS-TV, Channel 22.
But industry reports indicate Mega TV badly lagged stellar results at SBS’ radio division, which operates four Spanish-language FM radio stations in Miami and in six other U.S. cities and Puerto Rico.
In May of last year, insideradio.com reported that SBS’ radio division had seen a 75% rise in first-quarter revenues compared to the previous year but that Mega TV was “struggling” amid an 18% revenue drop. Analysts in an earnings call pressed company management to say whether they were considering selling Mega TV but got a noncommittal response.