Fox News makes a play for America’s shrinking Spanish-language market

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Fox News has launched a new Spanish-language venture. Fox Noticias started airing this month for an hour a day on the Fox Deportes channel — it’ll focus on news, sports and culture.

Mike Madrid, a political consultant at Grassroots Lab and the co-host of The Latino Vote Podcast, joined The Show to talk about what he makes of the fact that Fox News is undertaking this endeavor.

Full conversation MARK BRODIE: Mike, what do you make, first off, of the fact that Fox News is undertaking this endeavor?

MIKE MADRID: Well, in many ways it makes perfect sense, and in other ways it’s kind of perplexing. The first is the Latino market, the Hispanic market is exploding. The population is growing at a very, very fast pace — not just in the population, but with voters. And this is happening at a time where Fox News’ viewership is aging and aging out rather rapidly.

So as a matter of market share, it makes perfect sense for them to both open and find broader markets, especially with a younger demographic. But perhaps the most perplexing part is, why Spanish? Their actual largest increases in their English mediums are with Hispanic viewers, currently in English. The fastest growing segment of the Latino community is the third and fourth generation, which overwhelmingly are consuming media in English.

So this move into Spanish media is a little bit peculiar insofar as the Spanish speaking market is actually shrinking. Shrinking quite rapidly. And this further diversifies an already balkanized market, which is just kind of scattered. And the question becomes, is this a market play? Is this a political play or some combination of the two?

BRODIE: What does your gut tell you it is?

MADRID: My gut tells me it’s a long term market play for a couple of reasons. The first, again as I just mentioned, is the Spanish-speaking audience in, or amongst Latinos in this country, is shrinking. That’s true of Latino voters, as well. And not only that, but the fact that the market is becoming so fragmented, it would be an extraordinarily expensive and laborious undertaking to kind of try to speak to a small, fast-shrinking segment of the market that is amongst the most partisanized for Democrats with the least likely to yield any effective outcomes for Republicans.

So that doesn’t seem to add up, but I guess you could also make the argument that everything matters, every vote matters. And even though it’s expensive and inefficient, it’s worth the investment because the stakes are so high.

BRODIE: Well, and as you and I have talked in the past — and others have have talked about this as well — even though Latino voters traditionally and this year are expected to heavily favor Democratic candidates, the numbers and the margins aren’t as big as they once were. So I wonder, kind of alluding to what you were saying earlier, is this maybe a longer term play to maybe nudge that trend along a little bit?

MADRID: Well that’s exactly right. And again, no one is suggesting that the Latino vote will majority vote for Republicans, but they don’t need that. This is a play off for margins, as it is with all voter groups. A 2% or 3% increase with the Hispanic vote could have tectonic impacts in who is going to be the next president of the United States. So from that perspective, yeah, this would be a bold but again, expensive and laborious project.

BRODIE: Do you think that media companies — not specifically Fox News, but maybe including Fox News — understand the difference between Hispanic viewers and Spanish-language viewers?

MADRID: That’s a great question. I would say over the past 30 years, the answer to that would be no. But I think as the market is maturing and things like the Latino population is exploding. But Univision, the dominant Spanish language medium, is watching its viewership collapse. You’re beginning to understand that the Latino electorate, the Latino population, is far, far more nuanced than it was probably 30 years ago.

The great growth of Latino on the Latino population is happening with third- and fourth-generation voters, as opposed to decades ago, when it was largely an immigrant community that was Spanish dominant, that was consuming most of its media in Spanish. So things have changed. They’ve changed markedly. And even though the “Latino market” is growing sizable, the bigger the Spanish part of that market is getting smaller.

So I think the jury’s out as to whether or not the media companies are capturing this accurately. And it does make one wonder whether the objective here is simple market share. To me, that’s a better answer than trying to impact an election in the next two and a half weeks with such a significant investment. If the benefits are both and both happen, and all the better. But it’s hard to see a media company making this kind of an investment for something this short-term.

BRODIE: Do you get the sense that Latino viewers and Latino voters — especially as you say, are more and more speaking English — Are they looking for media and news outlets that are catering to them in some way, or are they just sort of interested in watching the news and hearing the news, regardless of whether it’s targeted at their community or not?

MADRID: That’s been a debate that I think is being decided on. The side of yes, there is a cultural component to the Latino audience that is unique, that is impactful and that is looking for more of what we call big entertainment. The big bands, the splashy entertainment venues. That is something that appears to be lasting generationally.

Point to Bad Bunny for example, not just the largest Latino, artist, but the largest artist nationally, even with English-speaking audiences. In many ways, Mark, what we’re seeing is the dominant American culture assimilating towards Latino culture as much as Latino culture is assimilating into American culture, because the size of the growth is watching these two communities meld into one.

And the differentiator there is not simply just English news or news as we’ve seen it, there’s absolutely a cultural component that incorporates the music, the entertainment, the tone, the style of sort of the intergenerational Latino citizen residents. So we are seeing more cultural aspects to consuming all media, including the news.

BRODIE: That’s interesting. So if you were in charge of Fox News and Fox Noticias, how would you define whether or not this venture is successful or not?

MADRID: I’m not I’m not a media executive, but I think the viewership is obviously the main metric. But the real question is a multiyear strategy that would see transitioning some of these recently migrated Spanish-speaking viewers — which is who they’re clearly targeting — transitioning either themselves and or their second generation children to the Fox English speaking brand.

Fox News, again, their viewership is so much older than the overall viewership in the country that unless they do start to bring in new viewers branding with a new generation of viewers, they’re going to hit a demographic cliff. So this seems to be part of that longer term strategy. And I think the only way to ask whether or not it’s a success is if they are capably branding the Fox product in the minds of these younger voters.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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