I am not a speaker of Spanish, but I teach media and am wondering about the dialect or accent of Spanish used in Spanish language media across the United States.
Is it based on the version of Spanish spoken in the region where the media outlet exists? Is there an overall preferred accent (like Midwest English is the preferred American English accent)?
What form of Spanish should a "Spanish Media" academic program in the US teach?
Thank you, Mahood. It makes sense that Univision sets the standard.
But what accent or version of Spanish do they prefer or do most of their on-air people speak?
No, I did instrument development in Mexican Americans and found they speak different tongues depending on where they (or their ancostors) were from, don’t even mention other Latinos., e.g., apegado and engrida.
I would doubt there to be one "preferred" dialect or "accent" because the hispanic population in the U.S. is incredibly diverse. The image that I attached to my reply is from the webpage whose link is separated below and shows origin statistics from hispanics in the US.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/06/19/diverse-origins-the-nations-14-largest-hispanic-origin-groups/
With regard to these statistics, even percentages like 3% need to be taken seriously because of the sheer volume of Spanish speakers in the U.S. (52,000,000 as of 2014, meaning Mexico is the only other country in the world with more Spanish speakers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_Spanish_is_an_official_language).
There is likely to be a diversity of national origins and dialects within Spanish-speaking media outlets that is fairly representative of the nation at large. I say this, however, with one caveat. Some regions have many more people from certain origins. For example, most Cubans are in Florida, there is a high concentration of Puerto Ricans in New York, and there tend to be higher concentrations of Central Americans in large cities or near the gulf coast (https://collagegroup.com/2015/04/14/differences-spanish-dialects/). This could--and this is only conjecture--make it so that although Mexican-origin hispanics make up about 64% of all U.S. hispanics, there may be a percentage of Mexicans working in media outlets incongruent with this 64%. I say this because most media outlets are in larger cities, so I would semi-confidently venture such to be the case in places like New York and Florida, at the very least.
Why do I bring this up? I brought it up in order to highlight the diversity of origin/heritage in U.S. hispanics as well as other factors that could make Spanish-speaking media reporters even more diverse than a simple across the board look at the U.S. as a whole would seem to suggest.
With all of this in mind, however, and despite the origin/heritage of any given reporter, there most likely exists--and is currently evolving/being defined or led by big media players such as Univision as Mahmood pointed out--a sort of standard Spanish that reporters will gravitate to just like there is a very particular way for English-speaking reporters to talk.
All in all, I really doubt there is a "preferred accent or dialect" for Spanish language media beyond a striving for a the most neutral and universally intelligible dialect a reporter can muster.
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