By the mid 1990s, it was apparent that something astounding was happening in Mexico, home of the world’s longest-running single party regime. Within a year of comfortably beating the divided opposition in the 1994 presidential elections, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had lost gubernatorial elections in the important state of Jalisco, as well as the mayoral post in that state’s capital city, Guadalajara. More state offices, the national capital and control of the federal Congress fell in rapid succession over the remainder of the decade. Mexico’s gradual electoral transition finally culminated in the PRI losing the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
In Jalisco, as across the country, repeated economic crises, the creation of autonomous electoral machinery and the development of a more demanding civil society explain much of what happened. But the independent press also played an important role in wresting away the PRI’s control. They challenged the PRI’s command over mediated information and pried open the Mexican public sphere of political debate and deliberation. This was evidenced in 1992 when the Guadalajara newspaper Siglo XXI exposed the attempted cover-up of the national government’s involvement in a powerful gas explosion. Nine separate explosions ripped open a mile of the city, leveling about 20 blocks of buildings and killing 200 people. The catastrophe and the government’s denial that a state-owned gas plant was the source of the leak became major political issues in the mayoral and gubernatorial elections.
Siglo XXI’s coverage of the Guadalajara gas explosion was indicative of the tremendous transformation occurring in the values and practices of the Mexican press during the 1980s and 1990s. These changes led to the emergence of a civic-oriented sector of the press that helped undo the PRI regime by reducing its ability to control the contours of public discourse. As early as the mid-1980s, reporters in a core of newspapers scrutinized and criticized government actions and statements. These first steps were tentative, but journalists began offering a voice to opposition political figures and providing more balanced coverage of elections. This transformation of coverage in civic-oriented newsrooms preceded electoral shifts at the federal level and in most Mexican states, and occurred at a time when collusion and control of journalists characterized most press-government relations.
It was the confluence of opposition to the PRI regime, ideas about critical journalism that filtered across national and academic boundaries, and control of decision-making power in the newsroom that allowed a group of change-oriented journalists to shift the focus of coverage within a core of civic newsrooms by the early 1980s. With political and economic liberalization, these changes in journalistic culture then diffused to a wider number of publications in the 1990s. Survival of a new form of Mexican journalism that enables participatory citizenship now depends on the ability of newsroom leaders to maintain both their jobs and their civic-based professional identities.
The authoritarian media system that existed in Mexico between the 1940s and 1980s had its roots in the consolidation of the Mexican state following the 1910 Revolution. President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) hoped to use Mexico’s growing media system as a development tool by using the press as a supporting voice for state initiatives. The developmental press model quickly metamorphosed into an authoritarian one as state co-optation and control of the media became more institutionalized. For most journalists, media support and reinforcement of the authoritarian Mexican regime became normatively appropriate and usually unquestioned. Columnists acted as messengers for political elites, writing articles that attacked corresponding political rivals. Government press offices dictated political speeches, press releases and press conference statements to most journalists, who faithfully reproduced the state’s messages and symbols in their articles. The reproduction of these state messages and symbols by journalists served to reinforce the regime’s legitimacy and control, while labeling dissidents as traitors or subversives.
Editor Roberto Rock, who guided Mexico City’s largest newspaper El Universal into the civic camp in the late 1990s, describes the journalists he encountered upon entering his first newsroom as a novice reporter in the 1970s:
“They were transcribers, let’s say, of official information. But that’s because the newspapers were that way too. There was no grave moral conflict…. But the issue of being critical, of being independent, the role of being a watchdog of the government, of public service, was very remote because the journalist assumed himself to be part of political life more than part of the social life of the country. So, he considered himself a companion at the table of the political elite.”
Over time, a civic-oriented form of journalism arose to challenge this passive, subordinate brand of news coverage. Influential agents of change within news organizations, responding to alternative visions of journalism and society, moved towards a form of reporting that was more autonomous, assertive and plural in its coverage of politics. These journalistic “entrepreneurs” had been exposed to other visions of the press in universities and from abroad.
At El Universal, Rock came from a left-leaning political background and developed his ideas about the press as a government watchdog while working as a reporter in Washington in the 1980s. When El Universal was challenged financially by the civic-oriented Reforma in the mid-1990s, El Universal’s longtime owner, Juan Francisco Ealy, chose Rock as executive editor over other, more conventional options. The publication’s business managers lined up against the new editor, but Ealy backed Rock’s project to transform the newspaper. Ealy’s support gave Rock the final ingredient necessary for effective newsroom change: Aside from opposition values and alternative ideas about journalism, institutional entrepreneurs need real power within their newsrooms.
Other journalistic “entrepreneurs” included José Santiago Healy, publisher of El Imparcial, a daily in Hermosillo, Sonora. Healy studied journalism at the Jesuit Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, Navarra University in Spain and Northwestern University in Chicago. His strong Catholic upbringing and free-market orientation helped formulate his opposition to the PRI regime. Alejandro Junco, publisher of El Norte in Monterrey and later Reforma in Mexico City, appears to have been influenced by his University of Texas education and the free-market environment of Monterrey. In Monterrey, Junco set up a training institute in the early 1970s with his former professor from the University of Texas at Austin. The purpose of the institute, which taught U.S. journalistic practices, was to change value orientations and professional identities, as well as heighten journalists’ skills.
At the left-leaning newspaper La Jornada, change came in a wave rather than a top-down fashion spurred by one change-agent. Journalists and non-journalists influenced by El Pais, a Spanish newspaper that resisted the Franco regime, created La Jornada in 1984. “La Jornada is produced daily by citizens who are worried about their country, about their newspaper, about the times and about their surroundings,” explains Jornada editor Carmen Lira. “La Jornada has believed—and has never stopped believing—in the possibility of a just and more civic country, in the right and responsibility of citizens to reclaim it, and because of that, in the possibility of change for our country.”[1]
Sustaining any type of real journalistic change before the 1990s was certainly not easy. The government was the major player in Mexico’s economy and newspapers relied heavily on advertising revenue from state-owned companies and government agencies. Loss of government ad revenue could close a paper. Other types of sanctions included tax audits, scrutiny of employment techniques, cuts in the state-controlled newsprint supply and general harassment. Furthermore, independent newspapers had to compete against publications that were receiving substantial government subsidies. Incentives to publishers who maintained the status quo included forgiving tax payments or workers’ social security quotas.[2]
The state’s ability to control advertising and other subsidies began to change in the late 1980s when the Mexican government began selling off hundreds of companies and deregulated the telecommunications and banking industries. The newly strengthened private sector firms became advertising powerhouses, robbing the government of its virtual monopoly over the tasty carrot (or mighty stick) it used to co-opt and control the media. At the same time, economic crises cut the largess of government press offices just when press officers most needed big budgets to maintain influence in the increasingly competitive market.
During this period, press coverage of economic, political and social crises were affecting public perception of governmental performance. The government, for example, was widely criticized for mishandling the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which official sources said killed 3,000 people, while informal reports put the number of dead at 10,000. Other events that shook the government’s credibility included electoral fraud scandals that began in 1986, the indigenous uprising in Chiapas in 1994, the assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio two months after the uprising, the 1995 recession and the $65 billion bank bailout in 1999.
This systemic uncertainty was mirrored by political changes. Opposition parties began gaining on the ruling PRI at the state and local level. In 1989, the government acknowledged the PRI’s first loss of a governor’s post to the conservative PAN in Baja California. The continuing change of parties in local and state governments meant reporters covering those beats began turning to former-opposition parties and candidates for information.
As political opposition to the regime continued to gain strength at local and state levels and news coverage of events began to take a more critical tone, a shift occurred in circulation numbers. Citizens began buying newspapers that practiced civic-oriented journalism. By 1997, most Mexico City readers had turned to Reforma, La Jornada and El Financiero. The capital’s primary publication, El Universal, also began to shift towards a civic-oriented style after the owner chose Rock to lead the paper.
The final elements explaining the increase in civic-oriented journalism are the evolution of the pioneering civic-minded newspapers of the 1980s and the political scandals the journalists of these newspapers covered in the 1990s. These civic newspapers trained cadres of young journalists who now head newsrooms across Mexico. The crises and scandals they reported in the 1990s reinforced their civic lessons and steeled their resolve. When asked if political assassinations and bank scandals influenced his vision of the role of news coverage, one conservative finance editor replied with the cry of the leftist Zapatista rebellion, “Ya Basta!,” enough already. “For what I do, the multiple economic crises in this country, as well as the Colosio assassination, have had a much greater impact because they are frequent, constant, jarring and transcendent. And they keep happening…. It is a huge call to all of us to do our jobs well. Enough already.”
Will civic-oriented journalism survive in post-authoritarian Mexico? The answer depends in part on continued structural reforms such as the country’s new access-to-information law, which was written and pushed through congress in 2002 by a coalition of independent newspapers, academics, human rights activists and opposition lawmakers. The law allows journalists and other citizens to petition and receive government information in a timely manner. It is the first of a number of proposed reforms that include making government advertising and the broadcast concession awards process more transparent.
Such reforms, if passed, will make journalistic autonomy and assertiveness possible. However, the survival of civic journalism also requires the continued institutionalization of civic beliefs and practices in Mexican newsrooms. This will be difficult, as commercial pressures on the media increase and electorally driven political change stagnates.
As was the case with the generation of U.S. journalists influenced by Watergate, Mexican journalists’ conceptualizations of their profession and its role in society were forged during a specific moment in time. In the Mexican case, the moment required an intense struggle to assert their professional autonomy from an authoritarian regime. The civic-oriented models of journalism that they formed during these times may endure through this generation. But after that, it will be up to a new generation of newsroom leaders to resist not only encroachment from the state, but from the market as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sallie Hughes is an assistant professor in the Print Journalism Program at The School of Communication, University of Miami. She is working on a book about the transformation of Mexican journalism. Juliet Gil is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the same school. Both worked in journalism before turning to academia.
NOTES
1. Carmen Lira, “Periodismo y poder,” La Jornada, September 20, 1999.
2. Mexican editor Julio Scherer documented direct and systematic payoffs to collusive journalists and newspaper owners in his 1991 book, El poder: Historias de familia.
