Mexico slides toward less press freedom
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This is the second post in which I’ve drawn on presentations from the International Symposium of Online Journalism, which took place March 27–28 at the University of Texas, Austin. Fifty-eight countries were represented among the 422 people who attended in person and 455 who participated online.
Previously I wrote about a special session conducted in Spanish for Latin American journalists — the Iberoamerican Colloquium of Digital Journalism ( Coloquio Iberoamericano de Periodismo Digital). This is the second post on the Colloquium. The first was Latin American media under fire.
I did not attend in person but watched the sessions here on YouTube.
All the translation from Spanish is my own. — James Breiner
In this post you will hear about:
- how press freedom has been curtailed in the past six years in Mexico
- how a reporter was subjected to waves of abuse for merely asking the president a question
- how the military is exerting more power in more parts of the economy
- how the press is fighting back — solidarity, alliances with other industries
Aquí un resumen en español del Coloquio entero por César López Linares
At the end of the all-Spanish Colloquium, Rosental Alves, host of the event and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, took a question from Mauricio Lira, a journalist from Puerto Vallarta, a tourism destination in Mexico.
Lira said that in earlier sessions of the Symposium, he heard about threats to liberal democracies in Hungary, Syria, and India. Autocrats there were trying to silence opposition voices in the press. “We’re going through this right now in Mexico,” Lira said, “and no one seems to notice.”
Several presenters the day before had held up Mexico as a hopeful example of press freedom at work, but Lira said, “In the past five or six years, things have changed a lot in Mexico.” He was referring to the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Morena party.
Alves responded by turning toward a reporter from Animal Político, a Mexican website known for fearless investigative reporting, and asking her to respond.
Nayeli Roldán took the microphone and apologized for not having anything prepared, but she clearly agreed with Lira that freedom of expression in Mexican media had eroded greatly in the past several years.
She said things will get even worse, not better, under Claudia Sheinbaum, hand-picked successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Their Morena party took power in 2018 and has gradually and systematically suppressed dissident media voices. Sheinbaum has shown she will continue those policies. The rise of autocracy “is our future” if nothing changes, Roldán said.
As an example, she described the response when she posed a question to López Obrador at one of his morning press conferences. She asked if the press reports were true that the Mexican government was still using Pegasus spyware to track journalists and political opponents? López Obrador had promised to stop.
For simply asking the question she received a torrent of insults and abuse in social media. “I was a trending topic for three days,” Roldán said. What’s different today from a few years ago is that media like Animal Politico can’t make their voice heard with the public, she said.
If a skeptical or contrary voice pops up, the government and its pals unleash waves of advertising to discredit them. Public media have been co-opted into silence. The ruling Morena party employs trolls and influencers to defame media and journalists that don’t toe the party line.
Even when the PRI party exercised the “perfect dictatorship” years before, social media could get the party to change course, Roldán said. But not under the Morena party.
Many political commentators in the U.S. and Europe have expressed optimism for Mexico now that it has a female president. Sheinbaum was elected in a landslide in June and took office last fall.
Actually, Roldán said, things are likely to get worse. Sheinbaum does not have the charisma of her predecessor that allowed him to keep tight control of the congress, the judiciary, and the army.
She believes the army is particularly worrisome since it has begun extending its tentacles aggressively into more areas of commerce, both domestic and international. They already control airports, highways, seaports, and border crossings.
“We need more alliances with our readers,” she concluded, “so they can hear us.”
She was echoing the words of Venezuelan journalist Luz Mely Reyes, who recommended regional alliances of media to produce and distribute news — such as what Connectas.org is doing for Latin America. And journalists need to enlist the help of people from other industries that are affected by the corrupting influence of autocrats. Finally, she emphasized the need to diversify revenue beyond advertising and grants.
Originally published at https://jamesbreiner.substack.com.
