ABC MAY LAUNCH NEW ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NEWS CHANNEL WITH UNIVISION

ABC may be about to enter the cable news wars with Univision as its partner, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Tuesday), citing people familiar with the negotiations. While rival Fox has links to the Fox News Channel, NBC News produces content for MSNBC, and CBS has ties to CNN, ABC News has no cable outlet (although it sometimes cooperates with corporate sibling ESPN for sports news). According to the Journal the new channel would air in English but target the burgeoning Hispanic population, and it would air from Univision’s principal studios in Miami. The newspaper observed that for both Disney, which owns ABC, and Univision, “the proposed venture would be a bet that consumer spending by U.S. Hispanics will keep growing faster than the rest of the population.” Moreover the Journal said, the thus-far-unnamed channel “will open Univision to the larger universe of non-Hispanic viewers.”