In the first narrative history of Mexico’s contemporary press, Andrew Paxman traces how the Mexican media has responded since the 1980s to outright state hostility and major threats to its existence—including a war on drugs that made Mexico the riskiest country for reporters outside a combat zone, a decline in revenue as readers and advertisers migrated to the internet, and a partial return to government cooptation. Based on interviews with 180 current and former journalists and extensive research in newspaper libraries, Mexican Watchdogs interweaves critical analysis with the stories of key reporters, editors, and publishers as well as the trajectories of Mexico’s leading print and online media.
Andrew Paxman is a research professor of history and journalism at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico. He has worked as a journalist in Mexico City and is a bestselling biographer, and earned his PhD in history from UT Austin.
Judith Matloff teaches crisis reporting at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. After getting her start as a reporter for the Mexico City News in the 1980s, she has more than 40 years of reporting experience all over the globe, including for Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of History, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Joint & Global Program Studies at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute, and NACLA.
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