Jake Lynch recently travelled to Mexico to make a documentary about how the country’s big media outlets report conflict. Watch the film and read about Mexico’s unique media landscape here<\/p>\n
Imagine democracy being suborned by a corporate takeover, with a business-friendly political party promoted by a dominant media group, and the Left being routinely smeared and belittled. A stretch, admittedly, for anyone here in Australia\u2026 er, hang on\u2026<\/p>\n
There is an important difference, however, between fears over editorial interference and the work of a secret cell within the biggest television station, channelling tens of millions of dollars worth of advertising and favourable coverage to an individual contender for high\u00a0office.<\/p>\n
A Sydney Morning Herald beholden to mining interests would, no doubt, be at risk of strategic silences over vital issues on the news agenda, but that is still some way short of a deliberate political\u00a0conspiracy.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Televisa, the world\u2019s largest Spanish-speaking media group who controls the puma\u2019s share of Mexican television, is alleged to have done. The campaign to elect the country\u2019s next president, which culminates on Sunday, has been enlivened by student protests under the slogan, “Mexico Respierta”, or “Mexico, wake up”, and one such protest gathered outside Televisa\u2019s\u00a0headquarters.<\/p>\n
What is sorely needed in Mexico is “objective reporting” which supplies viewers with the opportunity they need to make up their own minds, the students told NM. A banner at another protest read: “Even my mother manipulates me less than\u00a0Televisa”.<\/p>\n
The company denies there\u2019s anything amiss, but the local correspondent for the London Guardian has uncovered what are billed as leaked internal documents that apparently prove Televisa has for years been promoting Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, candidate of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico for 70 years before being ousted in\u00a02000.<\/p>\n
The smooth former state governor remarried a few years back, to the star of one of the station\u2019s popular soap operas. The couple have been heavily promoted on air ever since. Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s election posters appear to promise all things to all voters; wider access to healthcare and education, for example. Another important difference from the political landscape in Australia: he\u2019s brought the Green party onside and is presenting himself as the figurehead of a “compromise\u00a0coalition”.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s the frontrunner in opinion polls and has also promised to treble spending on “security”, even from its current raised level, in what amounts to a further intensification of the “drug war” that\u2019s cost 60,000 lives since the incumbent president, Felipe Calder\u00f3n, took office six years\u00a0ago.<\/p>\n
What we would certainly recognise here in Australia is the habitual ways in which that conflict is reported in mainstream media \u2014 not just by Televisa. There\u2019s a concentration on arrests of alleged “kingpins” of the drug cartels, and on the death and destruction they leave in their wake as they scrabble for control of key smuggling\u00a0routes.<\/p>\n
There is much less space for exploring why some people join the gangs in the first place, and what could be done \u2014 and is being done \u2014 to offer them a route to a better future. That is the major focus of this film, Peace Journalism in Mexico, which is based on material gathered for my research project, “A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict”. It\u2019s sponsored by the University of Sydney and the Australian Research Council, with partnership by the International Federation of Journalists and Act for\u00a0Peace.<\/p>\n