not lose any of its audience. It covered community events in Spanish, produced 11 and a half hours of local news a week, aired a weekly half-hour highlight show of the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted by longtime Dodger Spanish-language voice Jaime Jarrín; furthermore, KVEA was the production base for new Spanish-language shows screened nationally, including La piñata de los $25,000 (The $25,000 Piñata), the first nationally syndicated Spanish-language game show. At the end of the 1980s, KVEA came under some criticism for lack of representation of Mexicans—who comprised 90 percent of channel 52's viewership—in management. After Frank Cruz, a former KNBC news anchor who had been with the station since the 1985 launch, left in early 1989, three ranking Mexican staffers resigned together that June. The dispute escalated into calls by the National Hispanic Media Coalition for an advertising boycott of the station and picketing of its studios by protesters who felt the station favored Cubans in hiring and programming. KVEA's next bout of station turmoil came in 1997. Between February and August, seven longtime staffers were dismissed for supposed budgetary reasons, though one anchor, Ana Cecilia Granados, alleged that new manager José Ronstadt had a bias toward Mexicans and ousted her for being Central American. Meanwhile, employees sought to unionize KVEA; they voted to form a union, but management refused voluntary recognition. With another boycott threatened, KVEA recognized the union in November 1997, right before the start of a ratings survey. On January 15, 2001, KVEA launched an expanded news department, doubling its budget and its weekday output, as well as adding weekend news programs for the first time. The network then purchased KWHY-TV channel 22, its former pay TV competitor and later a Spanish-language independent, for $239 million in June 2001, creating a duopoly. Work was already underway on a comprehensive overhaul of channel 52's studios, and channel 22 was then integrated into the operation. NBC acquisition In October 2001, NBC announced it would buy Telemundo. The combination of the two parties owned three stations in the market; the FCC conditioned approval of the Telemundo acquisition on the divestiture of KWHY. Integration of the two operations took a major step forward in 2003, when 250 Telemundo employees moved to KNBC's studios in Burbank. KWHY sales and programming functions remained in Glendale while NBC fought for a waiver to keep all three stations; the next year, the FCC revised