News operation
From the moment Villanueva became channel 34's news director in 1968, KMEX adopted a policy that generally has set the tone for Spanish-language television news in the United States, that of "advocacy journalism". Villanueva was succeeded by Ruben Salazar, a former writer for the Los Angeles Times, in January 1970. General manager Rank managed to outbid the Times for his services, believing that Salazar would complement what Villanueva had started.[47] That August, Salazar was killed by riot police.[48] A documentary on Salazar's death, Peace... on Our Time: KMEX-TV and the Death of Ruben Salazar, won a Peabody Award for TV public service programming.[49] However, the station was also criticized by Chicano activists for moving quickly to shift the station away from the movement within days of Salazar's death; even an anonymous journalist told Hunter S. Thompson in his 1971 Rolling Stone article "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan", "[W]ithin 24 hours after Ruben was murdered, [Danny] Villanueva started tearing up the news department. Now he's trying to ... cut the balls off the news and turn KMEX-TV back into a safe Tio Taco station."[50] In its early years, KMEX-TV news was a small operation: in 1978, the station had two camera and reporter crews covering the Los Angeles area, and its newscasts primarily depended on material from United Press International and the local City News Service wire with less local news coverage than station management would have liked. The newsroom was in a converted house across the street from the studios.
KMEX news became known for long-tenured personalities in the market and as a launching pad for correspondents with network careers. The Los Angeles Times described Eduardo Quezada, who anchored the news on channel 34 for 28 years, as an "institution"; he left for KVEA in 2003.[51][52] María Elena Salinas worked for KMEX from 1981 to 1987 before becoming a national news anchor, a position in which she would remain for three decades.[53] Jorge Ramos got his first job in American broadcasting at KMEX and was tapped to host a morning show; a network executive in town saw the show one day and invited Ramos to Miami to start a national morning show, which soon led to him hosting national news for the network.[54]
By 1990, KMEX began to beat the English-language news outlets in certain demographics in news ratings, first 18–34 and then 18–34, 18–49 and 25–54 by 1996. The latter accomplishment led to coverage from channel 34's English-language competitors.[56] By 2005, what had been an achievement had become routine: a 2005 Univision press release trumpeted twelve straight years of ratings wins in the 18–34 and 18–49 segments for KMEX's 6 pm news.[57]
After a two-decade absence from morning news—having canceled a previous effort in the late 1970s to air network programming—KMEX returned to airing morning news with an hour-long program, Primera Edición, in January 1999. This was the first hour-long morning newscast produced by a Spanish-language TV station in the United States.[58] After just a year, the program was expanded to two hours, and the Univision stations in Miami and New York had followed suit and started their own morning newscasts.[59]
The 2000s brought increased national recognition of KMEX's work. In 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review graded the local newscasts in Los Angeles and gave KMEX the highest rating of any station in any language.[60] A news feature, El 15% de los Estados Unidos, which reported about the impact of Latinos on the United States, won KMEX its second Peabody Award in 2005.[61] In 2008, The Washington Post compared Southern California's English-language newscasts with KMEX's Spanish newscasts and concluded that "the sharpest coverage of state and local issues—government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care—is now found on Spanish-language TV", though it noted the criticism that KMEX's "advocacy journalism" style sometimes went a step too far on issues like immigration.[62] News director Jorge Mettey, who led the KMEX-TV newsroom for five years, was fired in 2007 for allegedly breaching ethics policies; Mettey sued the next year and claimed that Univision executives had a hand in shaping news coverage with the goal of increasing advertising revenues.[63]
An increased investment by local news at Telemundo in the 2010s gave channel 34 a challenge. For the first time since 1987, KVEA beat out KMEX among viewers 18–49 in 2014.[64] In June 2015, KMEX reformatted its morning newscast as A Primera Hora in order to target a younger audience.[65] In April 2017, Univision launched Edición Digital California, a midday newscast aired on all of its stations in California.[66][67]
