The weekly newsletter of the México Solidarity Project

Online at mexicosolidarityproject.org

March 29, 2023/ This week's issue/ Meizhu Lui, for the editorial team

Megamouth: The Outsized Influence of the ‘News’

“I heard that on the news,” people often say, as if that made what they heard an indisputable fact. Other people then repeat and re-tweet that “fact,” over and over, until that “fact” becomes our conventional wisdom. Major media outlets — like México’s Televisa or the New York Times — create a good bit of our “common knowledge” in just this fashion. They’re talking, in effect, into a megaphone. Other media outlets pick up what they report and act as an echo chamber for it. Other perspectives simply get lost.

As historian Andrew Paxman recounts in our interview this week, Televisa has exploited its near-monopoly status to give people the “facts” that Televisa has wanted people to hear, and that news has encouraged support for the PRI, México’s corrupt ruling party for most of the last century. For the owners of mega media, a sweet deal. They promote the neoliberal politicians dedicated to boosting the private sector. Those pols pass laws to help media barons grow their fortunes. Televisa’s owners rank among the richest men in México.

México’s megamouth media also routinely attack AMLO, whose efforts to roll back neoliberal policies threaten their top-of-the-food chain status. The US counterparts to the Mexican media take their cue from those attacks. Corporate America also has its own reasons for painting AMLO — and not México’s old elite — as a dangerous predator. US corporate execs see AMLO’s push to get Mexico’s private energy sector back under public control as a direct threat to their “right” to exploit México’s natural resources.

How can we dampen this right-wing din? Our México Solidarity Project and independent journalists from both the US and México are joining together to counter what media megamouths on both sides of our common border are spewing. Our media, we all believe, ought to help better the lives of all the little fish of the sea, not just feed the big-mouth sharks trawling the big dark deep.

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Televisa: The Manufacturer of México’s News

Televisa was founded as TeleSistema Mexicano when several stations merged under the leadership of Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who had already built a near-monopoly in radio. The programming on his stations would be nationalistic yet also pro-American, routinely supportive of the PRI, especially its right wing, and permeated with social Darwinism: The poor should know their place and let the white elite get on with running the country.

Azcárraga passed Televisa on to his son, Azcárraga Milmo in 1972, and then his grandson Azcárraga Jean took over at his father’s death in 1997.

The Azcárraga Dynasty/ Instagram

What relationship did Televisa have with the PRI?

Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, México’s PRI president from 1952 to 1958, permitted a monopoly in TV, despite a constitutional prohibition, presumably because he saw its propagandistic potential. That set the tone for the Azcárraga family’s relationship with the PRI, a symbiosis that protected their respective hegemonies, in TV and in politics.

So, for example, after the 1985 earthquake, Televisa minimized the impact of the 1985 earthquake on México City. Then, in the 1988 election, Televisa backed the PRI’s Carlos Salinas, marginalized and derided leftwing candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and helped rebuild Salinas’s credibility after the rigged voting. In the early ’90s, Televisa conducted propaganda campaigns in both México and the USA to push Mexico’s accession to NAFTA.

These last two examples illustrate the especially cozy relationship between the founder’s son, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, aka “El Tigre,” and Salinas.

In 2007, Mexican lawmakers passed legislation that would undermine the revenue of Televisa. Did this happen because the new president, Felipe Calderón, came from the PAN party and not the PRI?

No. After the 2006 election, México saw a multi-party backlash to Televisa’s favoring of Calderón and its heavy-handed pushing of a so-called “Televisa Law,” legislation that promised the national transition from analog to digital would not harm Televisa’s dominance over television. That backlash in late 2007 produced a new electoral law with a clause that banned paid TV ads in favor of free airtime for political parties, a new order that the Federal Electoral Institute, the IFE, would oversee.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has always maintained he was cheated of victory in 2006, and I think he’s right, but not so much due to voter fraud — something I think he overstates — as the massive wave of attack ads against him that spring.

Think of the “tank ride” ad that helped the Republicans sink the Dukakis campaign in 1988 or the Republican “swift-boating” of the Kerry campaign in 2004. But this onslaught against AMLO would be even worse, because in México attack ads are illegal, and the IFE waited ten weeks before stopping them. By that time AMLO’s 10-to-15-point polling lead had vanished. He lost by just 0.6 percent — and then the Federal Electoral Tribunal ruled that the attack ads against AMLO, while illegal, could not be said to have altered the result.

Rubbish! What ignorance of the impact that media can make!

Has Televisa ever been caught putting out fake news?

Not exactly. Historically, Televisa’s main deception has been its biased coverage of presidential and gubernatorial elections. Under owner Emilio Azcárraga Jean, who took control after the death of El Tigre in 1997, the bias became more selective. Televisa’s coverage of the watershed election of 2000 — the voting that finally unseated the PRI — showed only a slight bias. The coverage in 2006 and 2012 would be highly biased against AMLO. Then, in 2018, the coverage would be fair, probably because Televisa knew that by then AMLO had become too popular to stop.

Televisa probably came closest to fake news with its 2005 coverage of the capture of the French woman Florence Cassez, along with other alleged members of a kidnapping gang, and the freeing of their hostages. That capture, we later learned, had been re-staged for the cameras some days after the real operation, to make a newly established federal police force look good. Cassez’s nationality amped up the scandal. Carlos Loret de Mola, who later claimed he’d been duped, narrated the coverage for Televisa. 

Loret ran that exposé on his radio show, not on Televisa, and the report became a big embarrassment for the government. On W Radio, an outlet that Televisa used to own, and Latinus, a website reportedly funded by veterans of the PRI, Loret has reinvented himself as a leading critic of AMLO’s government.

Journalism has been one of the most dangerous professions in México. Have any Televisa reporters or staff been disappeared?

Televisa news teams strive to stay on friendly terms with presidents and governors, and Televisa acted as the main advocate of a 2011 media pact with Calderón to self-censor drug war coverage. That sort of behavior has left Televisa staff rarely targeted, either by corrupt politicians or by criminal organizations.

What connects Televisa and US media companies? Do these connections affect the news that the US public receives about México?

Last year Televisa merged its content business with US Spanish-language broadcaster Univision. The merger included the news divisions, but as far as I know they still operate separately. Univision has its own correspondents in México, and I sense they have greater editorial freedom.

What future do you see for Televisa? Will it play a role in the 2024 election?

Televisa’s huge influence began to decline slowly in the mid-1990s, with competition from TV Azteca and cable news, then more quickly during the Calderón years from 2006 to 2012, when a critical mass of Mexicans were switching for news and entertainment to the Internet. But that didn’t stop Televisa from doing more than anyone — possibly even more than the PRI itself — to get Enrique Peña Nieto elected in 2012.

Televisa’s influence has declined more quickly still in the last ten years, as audiences have become yet more fragmented. But Televisa remains the biggest media player by some distance, thanks to pay-TV and several Internet sites, as well as its broadcast operations. We can’t discount Televisa as a force in next year’s election. If at any point Televisa senses that Morena’s chances have dropped below 50-50, it may well opt to back the opposition candidate, since its natural affinities remain with the right. 

The same principal governed AMLO’s reconciliation with the right-wing owner of TV Azteca, México’s second largest broadcaster, Ricardo Salinas Pliego.

So opposing Morena in 2024 would be risky for Televisa. AMLO, for instance, could use his final months in power to give telecom mogul Carlos Slim the permission he’s long sought to enter the pay-TV market, now Televisa’s biggest profit-center. I think the threat of that move should keep Televisa in check.

500,000 Rally To Support AMLO, Reject US Intervention

March 18 marked the 85th anniversary of the 1938 decree by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas that ordered the expropriation of México’s oil industry. López Obrador called on his supporters to demonstrate on that day to mark this anniversary — and respond to his Mexican opposition and to US politicians and pundits who have ramped up their attacks against his government.

The attacks against the Mexican president haven’t been limited to the opinion pages either. Mainstream news coverage has also depicted the recent reforms in a negative light, with journalists like New York Times reporter Natalie Kitroeff characterizing the AMLO-backed reforms as an effort to “undermine the country’s fragile institutions.”

Far from undermining the autonomy of the INE, the new election reform law mostly mandates cost-saving measures. The statute eliminates redundant posts at the local and district level and expands voting rights for marginalized populations by facilitating voting for people with disabilities, people jailed awaiting trial, and migrants living abroad. The law also begins the exploration of future moves toward electronic voting.

With the Biden administration putting an increased emphasis on the need to “renew democracies,” these criticisms of AMLO’s alleged authoritarianism have put a strain on the US-Mexico relationship. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Menendez has issued a joint statement with House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCaul alleging that México’s recently approved election law “had imperiled the future of its country’s democratic institutions.”

Republicans have been even shriller. After the recent drug cartel murder of two American tourists, they labeled AMLO the “cartels’ chief enabler.” In a March 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former US attorney general Bill Barr called for unilateral military action by US forces inside Mexico and claimed that international law provides a legal basis for such an invasion.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, has called for drone strikes inside Mexican territory against the cartels. With a U.S. presidential election just around the corner, Republican politicians are scapegoating México to shore up their base, just as they did before the 2016 election.

Counter rallies like the huge March 18 rally in México City are showing that the López Obrador government has widespread public support, from people like Ricardo Valdez Ponce, who left his home in Matamoros late the night before for a 15-hour bus ride to México City.

“I do it with great pleasure because we’ve never had a president like the one we have now,” Valdez explained. “I am very proud and motivated to be here accompanying our president.”   

An earlier version of this piece appeared in Truthout.

José Luis Granados Ceja, a Mexican freelance journalist, is currently studying human rights and popular democracy at the Autonomous
University of Mexico City. His writings on democratic struggles in Latin America appear regularly online at his Antimperialistia site.

Recent news reports and commentaries, from progressive and mainstream media,
on life and struggles on both sides of the US-México border

US and México looking for migrants owed US $6.5M in wages, México News Daily. The US Department of Labor now plans to provide the Mexican Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare with a list of names of 13,000 workers currently living in México owed wages by US employers.

Obed Rosas, Estadounidenses trafican y financian el fentanilo que EU consume, dice CATO Institute, Sin Embargo. El CATO Institute señala que “el fentanilo es traficado principalmente por ciudadanos estadounidenses” y para ello citan datos de la Comisión de Sentencias de EU.

Jacqueline Charles, Caribbean nations support México as it targets US-based gun manufacturers with lawsuit, Miami Herald. México is arguing that US gun manufacturer marketing and distribution practices are fueling powerful drug cartels. The government of President López Obrador first sued US-based manufacturers in August in federal court.

EU: declaraciones irresponsables, La Jornada. La torpeza diplomática del secretario de Estado estadunidense, Antony Blinken, y el juego perverso del legislador republicano Lindsey Graham son sintomáticos de la inveterada costumbre de la clase política estadunidense de culpar a México y otras naciones por los problemas de consumo de drogas que azotan a sus comunidades.

Tony Perrottet, American Exiles in México City: A Tour of the City’s Radical Past, Wall Street Journal. After World War II, Americans fleeing the Red Scare filled México’s capital city.

Brenda Martínez, TikTok: Mexicana reclama a estadounidense por no hablar español en la CDMX y mexicanos le aplauden, sdpnoticias. Alguien en TikTok muy en contra de la gentrificación se anduvo paseando por la colonia Condesa y le reclamó a una estadounidense por no hablar español estando en la CDMX.

Independent U.S. labor board ‘increasingly concerned’ about Mexican reform, Inside U.S. Trade. Key parts of Mexico’s entrenched, company-friendly labor system could remain in place past the country’s May 1 deadline to implement reforms mandated under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, according to a just-released congressionally mandated report.

Veneranda Mendoza, Un sector del PRD pide al IEEM retirar al partido de la alianza “Va por el Estado de México,” Proceso. Cristian Campuzano encabeza la petición al considerar que la alianza con PAN y el PRI se opone a su historia, ideología y causas.

David Edwards, Rudy Giuliani: Let's set up 'safe zone' in México and 'bomb the hell' out of it, Raw Story. Trump advisor Giuliani lays out his plan for dealing with the drug cartels on his New York City radio show.

43 normalistas de Ayotzinapa: capturan a nueve policías municipales y estatales de Guerrero, Indigo. La tarde de 22 de Marzo, elementos de la Fiscalía General de la República capturaron a siete policías municipales y estatales de Guerrero por su presunta responsabilidad en la desaparición de los 43 normalistas de Ayotzinapa. 

The Mexico Solidarity Project brings together activists from various socialist and left organizations and individuals committed to worker and global justice who see the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of México as a watershed moment. AMLO and his progressive Morena party aim to end generations of corruption, impoverishment, and subservience to US interests. Our Project supports not just Morena, but all Mexicans struggling for basic rights, and opposes US efforts to undermine organizing and México’s national sovereignty. 

Editorial committee: Meizhu Lui, Bruce Hobson, Bill Gallegos, Sam Pizzigati, Courtney Childs, Victoria Hamlin, Agatha Hinman, Steven Hollis, Daniel McCool, Betty Forrester. To give feedback or get involved yourself, please email us!

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