How Do Journalists in Mexico Report on Organised Crime: Representing the facts, Interpretation and Self-Critique

Among the many outcomes of the so-called War on Drugs, Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalism. Besides killings and kidnappings, journalists are also frequent victims of beatings, arbitrary detentions, and online harassment, as well as many other acts of aggression. Anti-press violence has an evident impact on Mexican journalists’ daily activities, particularly as related to the coverage of organised crime. The endemic risk that news workers constantly face determines how they represent and interpret the stories they report on when it comes to this issue. Thus, this inquiry aims to analyse the practices that reporters and editors implement during the news-making process when covering cartels’ activities. In doing so, this paper draws on a set of in-depth interviews with news workers from Mexico’s main national newspapers, and from all the states where journalists were killed in 2017. The main findings indicate that there is a lack of written norms for the coverage of organised crime, and that reporters refer to criminals with a sense of familiarity. In addition, this study contributes to the understanding of journalists’ decisions in the field when doing their job, especially in dangerous conditions

Change and continuity in Mexican Journalism The case of Morelia

Since the eighties, the political face of Mexico has been changing gradually. There has been a shift from the hegemony of the official Institutional Revolutionary Party to a more egalitarian distribution of power, in which the other two main parties (National Action Party and Democratic Revolution Party) have gained salience at national, state and local levels (Camp 1999, Eisenstadt 2003, Hiskey 2003, Hiskey and Bowler 2005, Elizondo 2006 and Escalante 2006). Nonetheless, it is still not clear the impact of this reconfiguration on news organizations: in their studies on Mexican journalism, Lawson (2002) and Hughes (2003 and 2006) perceived a general trend towards modernization. By taking certain news outlets located in the most important cities (mainly in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey), they considered that, indeed, Mexican media are undergoing progressive change. However, looking at other places – like Morelia - makes evident that the situation in the rest of the country is different. Therefore, this research will argue that, despite the arrival of diverse political parties to the national, state and local administrations, the relationship between reporters and high rank political authorities remains the same. That is, the exchange of favours – economic most of the times – still determines the way news organizations and politicians interact. In short, rather than change, continuity is the rule of the journalistic practice, at least in the provinces of Mexico. For that reason, this study proposes an approach to the problem at two levels: macro and micro. The former is related to the media environment (the way news outlets are organised and operate) and the latter regards the interaction between reporters and their sources. The central argument is that the specific conditions of the media context shape the journalist-politician relationship. In sum, the discussion on change versus continuity of the Mexican journalism requires analysing the interaction between the macro and micro levels