I’ve been reading Enrique Krauze‘s México: Biografía del Poder (1997) and was struck by his description of the media environment under Miguel Alemán in the 1950s. It’s eerily reminiscent of what’s currently happening in the US under Trump.
He quotes at length from an article by the French columnist Jean François Revel:
You can read the Mexican press for months without meeting with the least little article that really criticizes the government. All the newspapers show a fawning respect for the world of political power, completely accept its most insignificant statements, and never exhibit any independent investigation, any honest reporting on the real situation of the country.
And yet the daily newspapers are big business and the publishers are major financial powers. A newspaper lives on its advertising, on paid articles, on blackmail (all the major businesses have to pay up in one way or another or else they might read “Coca-Cola is bad for your health” or some brand of cigarettes “can cause harm to your eyes”). But above all the newspapers feed on politics. It is a matter of playing the game with those who are in power and earning a share of the sure business opportunities that are the perquisites of the politicians.
The owners of the newspapers reap these benefits. As for those who do the writing, their salaries are miserable. Some of them are forced to find other means of access to the company safe and it can be said that, in this respect, honesty is all the more admirable in that it certainly does not pay. In Mexico, a daily newspaper consists of forty to fifty pages. Twenty are entirely filled with advertising; ten carry social news, entertainment and sports; six to ten pages are devoted to enormous displays in commercial type: they are messages from various organizations, states, unions, chambers of commerce or private groups and addressed to the authorities of the government, whether to thank them, ask them for something, wish the president a happy birthday, etc.
All the above brings in money. The rest, five or six pages, reports the official line and emphasizes if possible the event the government wants to stress. In general an inauguration or an official trip earn an eight-column headline on the first page. For international news, the agency dispatches are reproduced verbatim, faithfully echoing the line from Washington.
The press then is part of the governmental system, among whose primary beneficiaries are the owners of the papers. And the government can also exercise, as a last resort, a radical means of control. It has a monopoly on the importation and distribution of newsprint. As a result, the newspapers are in constant contact with a government credit institution, the Nacional Financiera, to which they are all more or less in debt.
Thus the press is shackled in a hundred ways and besides it cheerfully puts up with its chains.
But unlike the Soviet Union or pre-war Fascist states of Europe, the media didn’t fall down an extremist rabbit hole. “What kind of press was it, then?” Krauze asks, and cites Daniel Cosío Villegas‘ answer: “It is a free press that does not make use of its freedom.” Speaking of Villegas, Krauze writes:
The phenomenon seemed especially painful to him because during those years, while he was beginning his new role as a historian of modern and contemporary Mexico, Cosío Villegas was immersed in an intellectual and political world much closer to his temperament and convictions, the environment of nineteenth-century liberalism. With nostalgia and fascination for those times when Mexico, as at no other moment, had almost seemed to be a Western democracy, he was looking through hundreds of political newspapers of the era (argumentative, satirical, analytical, literary, Catholic, Conservative, Liberal) that had been issued across the years of the Reform and the French Intervention and in some cases survived till the year 1896 when Porfirio Díaz, as one of his projects, established the first “mass-market” newspaper in Mexico, El Imparcial.
Before that time, newspapers in Mexico had been not a business but “an extension of the activities of a man of letters.” Someone would start a newspaper to express and defend a system of ideas and would find in freedom of expression reason enough for its existence and the condition for its success. But with the creation of El Imparcial, things changed because of three factors that were basically still operative in the age of Alemán: the regime of Porfirio Díaz was dictatorial, the publishers of the newspaper were his friends, and it was a genuinely mass-market enterprise, with freedom of expression (or the defense of it) no longer a requirement for success.
19th century newspapers sound like early 21st century blogs for the somewhat monied “man of letters.” Paramount being bought up by a tech oligarch’s son who immediately fired of Stephen Colbert. Extortion of bribes from various news outlets through legal settlements. Even the name of the (de facto) state newspaper “El Imparcial” sounds like “Fair and Balanced.”
