Asynchronous modernization of the Mexican press. A center-periphery comparison

Abstract

After seventy years of an almost complete hegemony, in 2000 the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the presidency of the Republic to the oppositional National Action Party candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. That moment was considered the hallmark of the political transition that started in certain regions two decades ago. According to a group of American scholars, the transformation of the political system involved the modernisation of the media system as well, as the Mexican press as a whole was moving towards its professionalization. Nonetheless, diverse case studies focused on specific regions have found empirical evidence that prove otherwise. That is, the findings consistently prove that local and regional journalism is still determined by the customs of the authoritarian model. Based upon a content analysis of the coverage of the 2015 congressional elections in both national and state newspapers, the main argument of this article is that Mexican journalism oscillates between modernisation and stagnation. In other words, whilst the so-called national media – located in Mexico City – showed a more professional performance than those located in other regions (regarding – for instance - the use of diverse sources of information, and the implementation of different journalistic genres, other than the standard news story); both groups shared a similar political bias and a limited coverage of those elections. Therefore, the main conclusion is that instead of a general transformation or stagnation, Mexican press develops an asynchronous modernisation process in which there are simultaneously liberal and authoritarian features. However, the former are more frequent in national news outlets than in their regional counterparts, which tend to be inclined to the latter.