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The Latino community is made up of 60 million people in the U.S. alone, and NBCUniversal’s news division is doing everything it can to reach them.
During Adweek’s Elevate: Hispanic TV 2021 event on Tuesday, José Díaz-Balart, anchor of Noticias Telemundo and NBC Nightly News on Saturdays, said: “If the Latino community in the United States was a country, it would be the [country with the eighth-largest] GDP on Earth.”
‘The Latino community is the USA’
“There were more [Latino] eligible voters in this last presidential election.. than there are voters.. in Spain. It’s taken, and it will continue to take, a lot of effort for the mainstream to kind of understand it. The Latino community is the United States of America. We’re the fabric of this society, whether you see it or not.”
In his conversation with TVNewser senior editor A.J. Katz, Díaz-Balart emphasized the importance of Latino representation “There’s extraordinary Latino talent in news today,” he said. “One of the things that I think I’m extremely proud of, and it shows again, the evolution of our business and in our country, is there is a collaboration between Noticias Telemundo and NBC that has never existed anywhere else.”
NBCUniversal news group chairman Cesar Conde, who took the role last May, has made increasing diversity a priority, said Díaz-Balart. Conde has mandated two concrete goals: 50% of the news organization employees should be women and 50% of the total workforce should be people of color.
“We’re seeing that already making a difference, having an impact,” said Díaz-Balart. “And I think that those are the issues that are going to make both of the communities have the same level of sensitivity and representation in their news.”
What representation at the highest levels can achieve
The anchor discussed how correspondents at Noticias Telemundo will do a story about the Latino community, and their colleagues at NBC News will do a version of the same story. “Those correspondents do a story in English. And in Spanish, the same story, same perspective, same sensitivity and understanding in two different languages at the same time. That is revolutionary, and it shows what representation at the highest levels can achieve.”
While Díaz-Balart anchors the news in Spanish during the week on Noticias Telemundo, on Saturdays he has to make the transition to English for NBC Nightly News’ Saturday broadcast. “My issue is to always remember what language I have to be thinking in and speaking in, depending on what day of the week it is,” he said.
Díaz-Balart also touched on the differences between broadcasting to a Spanish-speaking audience on Telemundo versus an English-language one on NBC.
“The Latino community in the United States has a different perspective and understanding, I would venture to say, a more profound understanding of the issues of immigration,” he said.
“In many cases, they have suffered from it, in one way or another, directly. So when you give the news, you have to realize, for the most part, the audience you’re serving and, and for the Spanish language audience, there are interest and knowledge bases that are different than in the English language. I think there is much more similarity than there are differences in how you speak to and serve those two very distinct communities, but there’s a huge overlap.”
