Journalism Satire And Censorship In Mexico

Since the 2000 elections toppled the PRI, over 150 Mexican journalists have been murdered. Failed assassinations and threats have silenced thousands more. Such high levels of violence and corruption question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern societies, that democracy and press freedom are inextricably intertwined. In this collection historians, media experts, political scientists, cartoonists, and journalists reconsider censorship, state-press relations, news coverage, and readership to retell the history of Mexico’s press.

In this study, Ronald R. Rodgers examines several narratives involving religion’s historical influence on the news ethic of journalism: its decades-long opposition to the Sunday newspaper as a vehicle of modernity that challenged the tradition of the Sabbath; the parallel attempt to create an advertising-driven Christian daily newspaper; and the ways in which religion—especially the powerful Social Gospel movement—pressured the press to become a moral agent. The digital disruption of the news media today has provoked a similar search for a news ethic that reflects a new era—for instance, in the debate about jettisoning the substrate of contemporary mainstream journalism, objectivity. But, Rodgers argues, before we begin to transform journalism’s present news ethic, we need to understand its foundation and formation in the past.

An essential history of how the Mexican Revolution gave way to a unique one-party state In this book Paul Gillingham addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) gave way to a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience, where a single party ruled for seventy-one years. Yet while soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in Mexico it was civilians who formed governments, moving punctiliously in and out of office through uninterrupted elections. Drawing on two decades of archival research, Gillingham uses the political and social evolution of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as starting points to explore this unique authoritarian state that thrived not despite but because of its contradictions. Mexico during the pivotal decades of the mid-twentieth century is revealed as a place where soldiers prevented military rule, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was despised but decisive, and a potentially suffocating propaganda coexisted with a critical press and a disbelieving public.

This volume presents an analytical and empirical overview of the array of issues that the Mexican media faces in the post-authoritarian age, which jointly explains how a partially accomplished democracy, its authoritarian inertias, and its unintended consequences hinder the democratic performance of the media. This is analyzed from three points of view: the stalemate Mexican media system and ineffective regulations, the conditions of risk and insecurity of the journalists on the field, and the limits of freedom of expression, political substance, and inclusiveness of media content. A binational effort, with research from US and Mexican authors, a wide analytic perspective is provided on the macro, meso, and micro levels, allowing for a deep conceptual richness and a comprehensive understanding of the Mexican case. With leading researchers in the field, the volume revolves around the problems of the media in post-authoritarian democracies. By answering the questions of how and why the Mexican media has not fully democratized, the works encompassed here can resonate with and are relevant to other post-authoritarian countries and academic disciplines.

From covering the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1985 earthquake to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, Elena Poniatowska has been one of the most important chroniclers of Mexican social, cultural, and political life. In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines Poniatowska's writing, activism, and political participation, using them as a lens through which to understand critical moments in contemporary Mexican history. In her crónicas—narrative journalism written in a literary style featuring firsthand testimonies—Poniatowska told the stories of Mexico's most marginalized people. Throughout, Stephen shows how Poniatowska helped shape Mexican politics and forge a multigenerational political community committed to social justice. In so doing, she presents a biographical and intellectual history of one of Mexico's most cherished writers and a unique history of modern Mexico.

Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970 examines women journalists who conceived of their publications as political interventions in mid-twentieth-century Colombia. These journalists committed to shaping justice and opportunity for women in society through writing while battling within the publishing realm to also transform and professionalize the practice of journalism in their own terms. By analyzing the contentious narratives of gender and class these women crafted as well as their conflicting efforts to maintain their stature in the printing and public worlds, it reveals the ongoing negotiations involved within their disputes over inclusion and democracy in a country still finding its way to equality, peace, and stability between the 1940s and 1960s. This book challenges oversimplified portrayals of struggles for power that either glorify or vilify these historical processes by erasing the complexity of the political and social actors involved in them. It stresses the importance of women, but not to the expense of a balanced critique of their historical reality, actions, and endeavors. This is a history of paradoxical political manifestations and a redefinition of power struggles as multidirectional, intersectional, non-monolithic historical processes, from the viewpoint of women.