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A few years ago, some were predicting the demise of Spanish-language television.

Most of the Latino population growth over two decades has come from U.S. births, outpacing the arrival of immigrants. The thinking was that because most U.S.-born Latinos speak English and can consume a wide array of media, Spanish-language TV would recede in relevance.

But Telemundo has defied such forecasts to become one of the nation’s hottest news outlets.

The NBCUniversal-owned, Spanish-language network, a longtime underdog, has been notching viewership gains in advance of its highly anticipated coverage of this summer’s FIFA World Cup championships.

Last year, Telemundo increased its audience for its evening news, anchored by Julio Vaqueiro, by 11% over the previous year, according to Nielsen data. Its Los Angeles station, KVEA Channel 52, has surpassed entrenched giants Walt Disney Co.’s KABC and Univision’s KMEX, attracting more viewers for its local evening and late-night newscasts.

The Miami-based division has a strong social media presence. Its Telemundo Noticias (News) account boasts 16 million followers on TikTok, topping ABC News, CNN and Fox News.

Cultural and demographic shifts have helped fuel Telemundo’s rise. After more than a decade of immigration declines, border crossings surged during President Biden’s tenure — a tide that turned with President Trump’s return to the White House. Instead, Trump brought a torrent of significant news events, including immigration raids that reverberated through Latino communities.

“We are growing because we are telling the stories that are important to our audience,” Gemma Garcia, Telemundo’s executive vice president for news, said. “We are very audience-driven.”

When U.S. military forces seized Venezuela’s then-president Nicolás Maduro in January, Telemundo quickly flew its main news anchor, Vaqueiro, to report from Colombia, which borders Venezuela. The network interrupted its usual Sunday night fare for a news special that scored solid ratings.

Vaqueiro, 38, has become the fresh face of Spanish-language news after Jorge Ramos, who achieved prominence as a forceful advocate for Latino immigrants during his 40 years on the air, signed off from rival Univision in late 2024.

The younger journalist brings a softer tone to his reports. He was promoted to Telemundo’s main news anchor in 2021 after several assignments, including working at KVEA in L.A. He loves stepping out from behind the anchor desk in Miami to cover big stories.

Telemundo news anchor Julio Vaquiero

(Telemundo)

Vaqueiro traveled to frigid Minneapolis earlier this year after the deadly Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings. He broadcast from anti-ICE protests and stopped by a church to interview a pastor and volunteers organizing a food drive for immigrants too afraid to go outside.

“We’re very focused on being out there and reporting on the ground,” Vaqueiro said in an interview. “Being close to our audience, that’s a big part of what we are doing at Noticias Telemundo.”

Another key to Telemundo’s momentum has been its commitment to the Spanish language.

Media companies a decade ago raced to engage young, bilingual Latinos by launching start-ups, including a joint venture between ABC News and Univision called Fusion that flopped.

Now Telemundo is the one with cool cred.

Call it the Bad Bunny effect: While the Puerto Rican artist’s Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish befuddled scores of viewers, millions of other fans, deeply proud of their Latino roots, were thrilled by his performance celebrating everyday workers.

“With Bad Bunny’s rise and the Super Bowl, it felt like a shift in values towards the Spanish language,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew Research Center’s director of race and ethnicity research. “It has become a source of cultural pride … and it seems to be impacting the ways in which English-speaking Latinos also think about their identity.”

Bad Bunny performed the Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish in February.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

That increased affinity suggests that Spanish isn’t going away anytime soon.

“Our data has shown that Latinos say it’s important that Latinos in the future speak Spanish here in the United States,” Lopez said.

A slow build to a news leader

Telemundo’s rise was a slow build, coming nearly a quarter-century after NBC bought the network for nearly $2 billion.

Years of effort took root after NBCUniversal agreed in 2011 to spend big for the U.S. Spanish-language media rights to the FIFA World Cup, dethroning Univision, which had long televised the prestigious soccer event. This year, Telemundo is poised “to deliver the largest coverage in Spanish-language media history,” the network said in a statement.

It will provide live coverage for all 104 matches, including on the Telemundo and Peacock streaming apps.

Being part of NBCUniversal has brought other benefits, too, particularly as Telemundo’s main competitor, Univision, has struggled under a succession of ownership groups.

NBCUniversal integrated its English and Spanish-language news units at its television stations. In Los Angeles, KVEA’s newsroom is in the same building on the Universal lot as KNBC-TV Channel 4. The same managers run both divisions.

“All of these things have evolved,” said Millie Carrasquillo, a Hispanic media consultant and former Telemundo research senior vice president. “It’s an alignment of the audiences, an alignment of how technology is evolving — and also the way that news is being delivered.”

Telemundo’s national newscast, anchored by Vaqueiro, averages 1.2 million viewers, its largest audience in years.

But audiences, particularly younger ones, are less likely to watch TV news, so network executives have tapped the potential of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to boost their reach.

On TikTok, Telemundo reporters broadcast live from outside the U.S. Supreme Court last week as justices heard oral arguments on Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship for babies born to parents who are in the country unlawfully. Telemundo featured live coverage of the traditional Easter egg roll at “La Casa Blanca” (the White House) and frequent reports about NASA’s Artemis II mission, which scored millions of views.

“Radio and television hasn’t gone away,” said Mari Castañeda, University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Commonwealth Honors College dean. “But Telemundo has recognized that [cellphones] are where most of their audience is located and they leaned into that.”

Social media posts are easy to share, serving as a viral expansion of the network’s audience.

“Telemundo has emerged as a leader because it has modernized,” added Castañeda, a native of La Puente in Los Angeles County.

The U.S. Latino population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2024, rising from 35 million to 68 million, according to the Pew Research Center. Since the Great Recession, the growth has largely come from U.S. births, and the median age of U.S.-born Latinos is about 21.

The trend line bent during the Biden years as U.S. births roughly equaled the arrival of immigrants, Lopez said.

“Immigrants are still a very large part of the Latino story,” he said.

Noticias Telemundo anchor Julio Vaqueiro talks to a child living in a makeshift migrant camp along the Rio Grande near the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso border on Feb. 28, 2024.

(Telemundo)

‘This is a country we really love’

Telemundo’s brightest star — Vaqueiro — was born in San Juan del Río, north of Mexico City and came to the U.S. when he was 26 with his wife, who was also born in Mexico.

“We have three American kids,” Vaqueiro said. “All we know as a family is the U.S. This is a country that we really love and we’re grateful to it.”

In many ways, Vaqueiro’s journey is the story of U.S. Latinos.

“He’s Mexican but he’s also a U.S. Latino and he understands the context and issues that communities are feeling,” said Castañeda. “There’s a sense of authenticity and care that comes through.”

Vaqueiro wrote a book, “Río Bravo. México, Estados Unidos y el regreso de Trump, (Rio Grande: Mexico, the United States, and the Return of Trump),” to explore the political mood during a period of tumult and often tense relations between the countries.

Telemundo strives to stay out of the political fray, Garcia said.

“We don’t think about politics,” Garcia said. “We cover what is happening within our community, and now more than ever, we are on top of our community’s stories.”

Vaqueiro added: “We have to be very careful reporting the facts and verifying every information that comes to us.”

Political divisions course through Latino communities, including in South Florida where Telemundo is headquartered.

“We’ve always known that Latinos are not a monolith,” Vaqueiro said. “This is a complex community that is constantly growing. It’s diverse: geographically, culturally and generationally.”

Interest in news has swelled since Trump began his second term. Ratings are also up for ABC’s “World News Tonight with David Muir,” which is drawing 8.4 million viewers per telecast this season, outpacing NBC, Fox News and CBS.

In national news, Univision still tops Telemundo. In local news, Telemundo’s KVEA has continued to build on its lead this year, although KMEX remains competitive and Disney’s KABC remains dominant among English-language stations.

“I just hope that we meet the moment,” Vaquerio said. “This is a critical moment for Latinos who are navigating very difficult times under a lot of pressure.”

He has another goal, too.

“I want to lift Latino voices who are moving forward — opening new businesses and graduating from college,” Vaqueiro said. “I want to talk about the positive side of this community that brings huge contributions to the United States.”

Four Democrats running for governor called on their fellow candidates to boycott an upcoming debate at USC, reiterating concerns that the criteria used to determine who was invited to participate resulted in every prominent candidate of color being excluded from the forum.

“We ask each and every candidate who is in this race to recognize that if we can’t have a fair process for a debate, then we should all not participate,” said Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary. “We call on them to withdraw from this biased forum.”

Becerra’s call was echoed by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former state Controller Betty Yee during a Friday afternoon news conference.

The candidate’s request comes a week after some of them raised concerns about the criteria for Tuesday’s debate, arguing that it was engineered to allow the inclusion of San José Mayor Matt Mahan, who entered the race in late January and quickly raised millions of dollars from Silicon Valley executives.

“The rules initially were polling and money. Matt Mahan is [polling] lower than some of us, period,” Villaraigosa said, adding that the debate organizers “then added time in the race,” which resulted in Mahan’s invitation.

Mahan’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Friday, but when Becerra raised such concerns last week, Mahan said the former Biden administration official ought to be included in the debate.

The matter is further complicated by Mahan supporters who have notable ties to the university.

Mike Murphy, a co-director of the USC center hosting the debate, has been voluntarily advising an independent expenditure committee backing Mahan. The veteran GOP strategist said last week that he had nothing to do with organizing the debate and that he has asked for unpaid leave at the university through the June 2 primary if he takes a paid role in the campaign.

USC has also received tens of millions of dollars in donations from billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and his wife. Caruso, a USC alumnus who served as a trustee for years, is also a Mahan supporter.

A representative for Caruso did not respond to a request for comment.

The debate, hosted by the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, KABC-TV Los Angeles and Univision, is scheduled to take place on campus at 5 p.m. Tuesday — less than two months before ballots begin arriving in voters’ mailboxes. The forum will be streamed and broadcast on ABC and Univision affiliates across the state.

USC and the television stations put out a joint statement Friday morning, prior to the candidates’ news conference, justifying the criteria used to determine who was invited to participate and saying none of the debate partners had any influence on the methodology.

“We want to be clear that we categorically, unequivocally deny any allegations that the debate criteria was in any way biased in favor or against any candidate and want to clarify the facts,” they said in a statement, adding that Christian Grose, a USC political science professor, was asked to develop “data-driven” benchmarks to determine which candidates were invited.

“The methodology was based on well-established metrics consistent with formulas widely used to set debate participation nationwide — a combination of polling and fundraising — and developed without regard to any particular candidate.”

After the Democratic candidates called for their competitors to not participate, USC and KABC declined to comment further. Univision did not respond to a request for comment.

Grose defended the methodology he crafted as “objective” in an interview Friday, and said he met with Becerra as well as the staff of other candidates to explain it.

“The idea that it was biased or designed to create some sort of outcome to disfavor the candidates who spoke at the press conference is just not correct,” Grose said, adding that attacks on the methodology have a “chilling effect” on universities and media outlets who sponsor debates.

“I’m not worried about the optics,” he said. “The optics are we are having a debate at USC to inform voters and educate students.”

Jarred Cuellar, a political science assistant professor at Cal Poly Pomona, described Grose’s methodology as “thoughtful” and “empirically grounded,” and characterized the concerns raised by candidates not included in the debate as unfounded and not credible.

“The formula is methodologically sound and represents a clear improvement over how debate participation has often been determined,” he said. “Rather than relying on a single metric such as polling, it takes a multidimensional approach to evaluating candidate viability. That approach better reflects how political scientists measure complex phenomena like electoral competitiveness.”

But the controversy has caused consternation among USC professors past and present.

“It seems like an unforced error that is casting the entire event in a bad light,” said a current USC professor who closely follows politics but is not involved in the debate, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s super important that if the debate happens, it happens correctly.”

Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist who taught election and environmental law at USC for 19 years, said that while he believes the large field of Democratic candidates needs to be winnowed, that’s not the job of a university or media outlets.

“Every one of these eight [Democratic candidates] is capable of running the state of California,” he said. “ It would certainly be my advice to USC and to Univision and to ABC to allow all the candidates to take part, or to cancel the debate.”

The four Democratic candidates not invited to the debate argued that voters are just starting to pay attention to the thus-far sleepy race and that diverse candidates should be represented.

“We are a minority-majority state, and the idea that the four candidates of color are not going to be on the stage to bring those perspectives, to really speak to those communities, is really not doing right by the voters,” Yee said.

Becerra said some of the candidates had requested to speak with top university leadership, including President Beong-Soo Kim. In other conversations, he said university officials raised the possibility of “either canceling this debate or incorporating more of the candidates in it. Evidently they could not agree to do that. … I think they recognize that there were problems with the way this debate had been organized.”

Becerra said he reviewed the formula and has “never seen” debate criteria like it before during his decades of serving in elected office.

“Your fundraising numbers are divided by the number of days you’ve been out there campaigning in front of voters,” he said. “So you could have raised millions of dollars, but if you’ve been in longer than someone else who just raised millions of dollars very quickly, you get penalized.”

Campaigns for the invited candidates — Democrats Rep. Eric Swalwell of Dublin, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, climate activist Tom Steyer and Mahan; as well as Republicans Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton — did not respond to requests for comment on the call to boycott the debate.