By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, March 2012
In mid-March 2012, broadcast journalist and former LAUSD spokesperson Diana Munatones died at 66 of unspecified causes at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. The Bell Gardens Sun ran the most substantive obituary, framing her career as one of the trailblazing Latina executives in American broadcast television management. Her broadcast career had started in 1973.
Then
Diana Munatones had been one of the substantive Latina executives in American broadcast-television management across the 1970s-2000s. Her broader career arc had spanned multiple LA-region television stations.
Her post-broadcast career had included a substantial LAUSD spokesperson tenure — moving from on-air-and-management-side broadcast work into public-information/communications work at the country’s second-largest school district.
The Bell Gardens Sun obituary was characteristically the kind of community-newspaper documentation of a substantial LA-region Latina civic-and-media career that the mainstream LA-region press had under-produced.
Matthew Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing pulled the community-press obit forward to a broader LA-region media-community audience.
Now
LAUSD has continued through multiple subsequent superintendent and board-leadership cycles since 2012 — Cortines, King, Beutner, Carvalho — each producing substantial press-relations infrastructure changes.
The American Latina-broadcast-television-management category has substantially grown across the post-2012 interval. Multiple subsequent Latina executives have moved into senior broadcast-television-management positions.
Eastern Group Publications has continued operating as one of the LA-region community-press networks.
The 2012 piece reads now as a documented moment of cross-press collaboration — a community Spanish-and-English-language newspaper obituary getting picked up by a media-industry blog.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.