For over fifteen years, Mexican journalists have earned the unfortunate superlative of reporting under the world’s most dangerous conditions outside of an active war zone. In addition to generating significant concern about the viability of a critical press, this situation has raised a central paradox: as Mexico transitioned away from one-party rule and implemented greater electoral competitiveness, conditions for media workers have worsened.
One obvious source of violence is the so-called “war on drug cartels,” initiated by former President Felipe Calderón shortly after taking office in 2006. His administration sent the military into drug trafficking strongholds, a strategy now widely recognized—including by current President Claudia Sheinbaum—as aggravating violence and multiplying criminal organizations. This militarization has left at least 300,000 dead, over 100,000 disappeared, and countless more displaced.
Journalists reporting from contested territory have found themselves caught between traffickers and the state.
Journalists reporting from contested territory have found themselves caught between traffickers and the state. Like any powerful entity seeking to control territory, traffickers see value in controlling the narrative and thus pressure reporters to cover specific acts of violence while suppressing others. Credible accounts also abound of “narcoperiodistas,” reporters hired by traffickers, lurking among legitimate newsroom staff. Meanwhile, public officials were reportedly responsible for over forty percent of the violence toward and intimidation of media workers during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), better known as “AMLO.” This figure, while terrifying, obscures the notably fuzzy boundaries between those who occupy public office and criminal organizations.
In the last few years, social scientists have sought to better understand this puzzling media landscape. Grisel Salazar, for example, considers why critical media persist at all, given the high likelihood of retaliation. Works by Julieta Brambila, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine Relly, and Celia del Palacio Montiel, further examine journalists’ resilience, highlighting the measures news staff have taken to protect themselves. At the Universidad de Guanajuato, del Palacio Montiel spearheads the Observatorio de Libertad de Expresión y Violencia contra Periodistas.
Andrew Paxman joins this wave of scholarship to explore the challenges of contemporary journalism. In Mexican Watchdogs: The Rise of a Critical Press since the 1980s, he traces major developments in the industry over the last four decades. While he doesn’t shy away from discussing violence, he focuses on the political and business history of Mexico’s media, surveying the major platforms and journalists who have distinguished themselves for their willingness to expose corruption in both the private and public sector.
In covering these decades, Paxman ushers readers through major moments in Mexico’s recent media history and provides insights into the rise and fall of important outlets. He writes in a highly readable style that will be accessible to anyone interested in the recent history of Mexico’s press. Based on interviews with dozens of journalists and intellectuals, the narrative also dishes on the interpersonal conflicts and battles of egos that shaped the media landscape. While most of the story is centered in the capital, the book also discusses newspapers like El Norte (Monterrey), Siglo 21 (Guadalajara), and Zeta (Tijuana).
Paxman opens the book by narrating his personal experience as an ex-pat reporter for the English-language newspaper, The News, in the 1990s. This introduction marks a refreshing break from the distant perspective typical of most academic histories. The approach also provides insights into how Paxman’s reporting shaped the questions he now asks in this book. Through a punchy narration of the colorful personalities that inhabited newsrooms, Paxman brings to life a journalistic culture shaped by clientelism and a deep deference to political authority. He further situates foreign reporters within this landscape, reminding readers that the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) increased international reporting on Mexico, resulting in an influx of foreign correspondents to the capital.
NAFTA also brought about other important changes, including a series of neoliberal economic reforms intended to modernize Mexico’s economy and make it more appealing to investors. Paxman dates Mexico’s “brief ‘spring’” of pluralistic and independent journalism to this moment, highlighting changes implemented by the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). Paxman echoes an earlier generation of scholars in affirming that economic reforms created more independence for print media and coincided with—and helped produce–cultural shifts that energized newsrooms.
For decades, the federal government incentivized media self-censorship through ad buys, subsidized newsprint, or direct bribes.
For decades, the federal government incentivized media self-censorship through ad buys, subsidized newsprint, or direct bribes. News directors and publications relied heavily upon these funds to turn a profit or merely stay afloat, a practice that led scholars and prominent journalists to describe the Mexican press as corrupted by the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Something I have attempted to show in my own research is that, prior to the 1990s, select print media were able to negotiate these restrictions and report critical pieces, which had important consequences for the development of a critical public of readers. Paxman recognizes that such spaces existed but underscores that the wider flourishing of media could not have happened without policy changes in the 1990s that allowed print media to enjoy greater financial independence from the government. In so doing, Paxman reasserts the primacy of structural, financial conditions in evaluating press freedom.
In this telling, the spring of Mexican journalism was short-lived. By the mid-2000s, Mexican media faced many of the same challenges as other news outlets around the world: diminishing public trust, disinvestment in hard news, dwindling sales with competition from the internet, and attacks from public officials. Mexican journalists who conducted some of the bravest reporting became the objects of lengthy and exhausting legal battles as public officials and businessmen leveraged libel laws against them to claim defamation.
The use of federal funds to bully or cajole media institutions, moreover, returned with a vengeance. As Paxman underscores “the disdain of presidents, the cutting of subsidies, and the veiled threats of provincial politicians are everyday forms of ‘media capture’ in the 21st century.” Needing to justify its “war on drugs,” Felipe Calderón’s government increased ad spends by thirty-four percent, incentivizing positive coverage. Upon taking office, AMLO infamously slashed federal advertising by eighty percent. His creation of a new morning press briefing also deepened these tensions. While AMLO argued the mañanera was a necessity in the face of conventional media, which he characterized as captured by elites and thus hostile to his movement, he used the platform to berate his critics and restrict access to outlets whose correspondents asked inconvenient questions.
The removal of federal subsidies hurt the bottom line of many media institutions, a trend exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Very few outlets continued receiving federal ad buys while those that did have minimized their criticism of the former president and his successor. Thus for good reason, Paxman depicts these funds as corrupting and the wider media environment as reflecting the broader state of political polarization. But polarization occurs not only between publications but also within them. Close readings of the press are needed to flesh out not only the influence of ad buys, but also to see how such institutions are navigating decisions regarding coverage. Interestingly, the book gives little space to analyze the media content itself.
Through extensive interviews and a broad reading of literature and memoirs on the press, Paxman brings to life the interpersonal dimensions that animate Mexican journalism.
Through extensive interviews and a broad reading of literature and memoirs on the press, Paxman brings to life the interpersonal dimensions that animate Mexican journalism, particularly in the capital. But privileging these sources has its downsides. The interviews reflect the pessimism that pervades the media industry today and, when read without critical distance, they tend to reinforce longstanding narratives about a corrupt Mexican media. For much of the twentieth century, particularly with the ascendance of a global liberal model of press freedom that values critical (and economic) distance from the state, this narrative has insisted that Mexico’s press doesn’t stack up and tends to downplay the significant work reporters pursue—often at great personal cost.
In the epilogue, Paxman raises the important issue of plummeting public trust in media, which he blames on shady financial ties and ad hominem attacks from governing officials, particularly AMLO. González de Bustamante and Relly offer a different explanation, underscoring that dwindling public trust in media is linked to the decreased connections between journalists and their publics, an argument that Paxman gives surprisingly little attention to. Regardless of the reason, the absence of public support spells disaster for the safety of these journalists. If the public isn’t outraged about the deaths of reporters, the government will have little reason to respond.
While Mexican journalists encounter a uniquely difficult landscape for press freedom, they also are part of large-scale trends, as Paxman notes. Looking at the overall structure of media, Paxman paints a grim picture for the future, arguing that “like many countries, Mexico risks regressing toward a society akin to eighteenth-century Europe, in which an elite pays for reliable information, written and edited by specialists, and the large majority contents itself with a freely available mix of unfiltered reports, polemic, and rumor.” There are no easy solutions, particularly with the additional threat of artificial intelligence. If there is any source for optimism, it is that there still are many Mexican reporters who insist on investigating wrongdoing, against all odds.
Vanessa Freije is an Associate Professor of International Studies and History at the University of Washington. Her research examines the history of information, technology, and media politics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. She is the author of Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2020).