Telemundo working to move up in U.S. political coverage
MIAMI — Twenty miles west of this city’s glittering oceanfront, closer to the Everglades than to the Fontainebleau hotel, a hangarsize office building rises from the flatlands like a spaceship.
The employees here enjoy techindustry perks such as unlimited coffee, gourmet lunch options and 24-hour dry cleaning service. For those who drive to the office, a smartphone app offers the ultimate motorists’ convenience: Touch a button and an attendant gasses up your car while you’re at work.
The space, which opened last year, could easily be home to a tech startup. But it houses a more traditional business: Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network owned by Comcast. And the $250 million campus reflects the brighter prospects for a channel that is taking steps to position itself at the center of the political conversation.
Long in the shadow of its bigger, older rival, Univision, Telemundo and its news division scored a coup last month by landing the first interview granted by President Donald Trump to a Spanishlanguage outlet during his White House tenure. José Díaz-Balart, Telemundo’s chief anchor, challenged Trump when he asserted that many Latino voters supported deportations.
Days later, the channel and its corporate cousins, NBC News and MSNBC, hosted the first debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race here. Voice actors performed a live Spanish translation of the proceedings, during which Díaz-Balart, one of five moderators, cued Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., to answer questions partly in Spanish.
It amounted to a statement of intent by Telemundo about its role in a campaign season when Trump’s restrictive immigration policy, which has unnerved many U.S. Latinos, is expected to be a focus.
“These are investments we are making because we believe the issues most important to our community are the issues being debated right now,” said Cesar Conde, chairman of NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises.
After years as the also-ran to Univision, Telemundo has broken out: In the key audience group of adults under 50, the network expects to finish ahead of its rival in weekday prime time for the third season in a row. (Univision still has the edge in total viewers.) It’s a turnaround that had been brewing since NBCUniversal acquired the network in 2011.
The channel placed a big bet on live soccer, spending $600 million to get Univision’s World Cup broadcast rights. And Conde, who joined Telemundo in 2013 after leading Univision, ordered up edgier programming, including telenovelas filmed on its Miami soundstages.
Investing in journalism, executives say, is a logical next step. In May, Telemundo hired one of Univision’s top news executives, Patsy Loris, to oversee its coverage of the 2020 presidential race. Ratings for its flagship newscast, “Noticias Telemundo,” hosted by Díaz-Balart, are up more than 30 percent from 2018. Conde said the news division was creating its first investigative unit and that an English-language streaming newscast aimed at Latino viewers would soon debut online.
Still, the competition is steep. Univision has led the way in aggressive reporting for the U.S. Latino audience. The network’s chief anchor, Jorge Ramos, was among the first journalists to be ejected from a Trump campaign event, after he asked tough questions of Trump during an Iowa news conference. The nightly “Noticiero Univision” newscast continues to outrank Telemundo’s offering.
Univision executives said they, too, planned to aggressively cover the 2020 race — and suggested that their past confrontational coverage might have been a reason that Trump opted to sit down with a rival network.
“The more that we do our jobs in terms of questioning authority and holding people in authority accountable, sometimes the more difficult it is for us to have access,” said Lourdes Torres, Univision’s head of political coverage and special projects. “It makes it more difficult to get an interview with the president, makes it more difficult to get access to some of those rallies. But we don’t stop trying to get those answers.”
As for Telemundo’s encroachment onto political turf, Torres took a measured view. “Latino viewers are the ones who can take full advantage of us having good competition,” she said. “If there are other people out there emulating and trying to do what we’ve been doing for years, that’s something that makes us proud.”