Mexico

Mexico's journalism, like its politics, has changed enormously since the mid-1980s. Yet as journalism and other key institutions in Mexico reform, many of their defining characteristics are rooted in the country's long period of single-party rule. Mexican politics and society are in a process of gradual transformation and journalism reflects this pattern of uneven change.

In the 2000 presidential elections, Mexicans peacefully ended 71 years of federal rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) during a gradual political transition that dates at least to the mid-1980s. Mexico's hegemonic party system, presidentialist governing structure, and state-led economic development model garnered decades of legitimacy for the PRI regime. Until the economic crash of 1982, the political system's legitimacy generally was premised upon appeals to the ideals of the Mexican revolution, resolution of the problem of presidential succession, corporate and clien-telist control of organized groups, targeted cooptation and repression of opposition leaders, and concrete material gains for urban dwellers. Control of media messages and cooptation of media owners and journalists were also central to regime survival until the 1980s, when an expanding segment of the press interacted with civil society to push political elites toward a set of pacts that eventually led to free and fair elections in 2000. Radio in the period occasionally acted as a public plaza, airing complaints against the regime in call-in talk shows, but television changed very late in the transition, similar to what happened in Brazil with TV Globo.

Moving from a relatively uniform institution that supported a single-party state for seven decades, several models of journalism now coexist in Mexico. The country's hybrid media system includes market-driven, civic-oriented, and holdover authoritarian elements. Ethnographic research and work by journalists' organizations suggest that journalists' values, ethical orientations, and desired norms of conduct have moved furthest since the breakdown of the authoritarian government, but actual practices vary greatly across news organizations, media types, and geographic regions. Journalists' expressed values tend to reflect a civic-oriented or public-interest model, but actual news coverage mixes civic, market-driven, and authoritarian style journalism.

The distance between expressed values and actual journalistic output is the result of hierarchical power relations in news organizations. Journalists labor with relatively little autonomy over their work product. Because of that, media owners (or, alternatively, politicians' directives in the less common state-owned media sector) ultimately determine the journalism practiced by a particular news organization. The longer-term structural conditions within which journalists [Page 892]operate include a semi-authoritarian legal framework that is beginning to open, growing violence against journalists, heavily concentrated broadcast ownership, the supremacy of ratings over public interest broadcast journalism, and weakness in the country's media regulation.

The legal framework has changed most since Mexico became a more competitive electoral democracy in the early 2000s. The country created Latin America's most effective federal law allowing access to government information and a federal protection of journalists' confidential sources. It also weakened federal criminal defamation charges as a way to control the press, although criminal defamation still exists in most states. On the other hand, violence against journalists, which has been increasing since the mid-1990s, partly reflects the growing influence of narcotics trafficking, but also the weakness of Mexico's judicial system and the fact that earlier means of controlling the press no longer work as well. As of mid-2007, an effort to open up broadcasting to greater competition and ownership diversity was part of the antimonopoly reforms under consideration by the new presidential administration.

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