ELECTIONS-MEXICO: Campaign Serves as Press Freedoms Barometer

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Pilar Franco

MEXICO CITY, Jun 7 2000 (IPS) - The close race for the Mexican presidency reveals greater independence of the communications media, but some analysts say there is still a long way to go to establish full freedom of the press here.

Mexico’s worst periods of press persecution are a thing of the past, but according to the Latin American Federation of Journalists, two of the 11 journalists assassinated in the region since January were killed in this country.

Mexico is second only to Colombia among Latin American nations for the number of journalists assassinated for practicing their profession.

In the last decade, 220 members of the news media have been killed in the region, while the world total for 1999 was 87 journalists assassinated, according to the latest report by the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Fund (UNICEF).

Mexico’s current presidential election campaign, the most hotly contested in the nation’s history, has brought to light the relationship between the media and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has won all the presidential elections in the last seven decades by overwhelming margins.

The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has called on Mexico’s nearly 60 million voters to cast their ballots in the presidential and legislative elections slated for July 2.

Though it is far from the 83.1 percent of radio and television airtime it enjoyed during the presidential campaign 12 years ago, the governing PRI maintains a notable advantage over the rest of the parties in media coverage.

News programmes on Mexican radio and television have broken with tradition by giving greater coverage than in previous years to the campaigns of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and the centre-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the two principal opposition parties.

Recent polls seem to indicate that the July 2 presidential elections are going to be a close call between the PRI’s Francisco Labastida and his PAN rival Vicente Fox.

The PRI is no longer the sole and systematic beneficiary of the unequal distribution of airtime on the country’s radio news programmes, according to an IFE study released Wednesday.

A study of 13 radio stations shows that the PRI receives more on- air mentions than its rivals, though the coverage of the governing party during the current electoral campaign has not exceeded 54 percent of all political coverage in any one case.

Monitor, the most important news programme at the national level, gave the PRI the least coverage, with 20.6 percent, compared to 48.2 percent for PAN and 10.5 percent for the PRD.

In this country, where newspaper readership traditionally has been low, making the broadcast media especially powerful. TV and radio gave just 3.1 percent of their news coverage to PAN during the 1988 elections and 1.6 percent to PRD, according to IFE data.

In the elections that brought President Ernesto Zedillo to power in 1994, the PRI claimed 41 percent of campaign coverage on radio and television, while PAN had 18.7 percent and the PRD 17.8 percent.

“The advances Mexico has achieved in the area of freedom of the press throughout the years have been significant. But this does not mean the battle has been won,” stressed media analyst Sergio Sarmiento.

The recommendation coming from the President’s office that the media refrain from covering an incident in which unknown assailants fired weapons at the doors of the presidential residence was seen as a throwback to the times when information was subject to tighter government controls.

But it was also interpreted as a sign of media independence from the government because “almost nobody paid attention to the recommendation,” pointed out Sarmiento.

The weekly magazine ‘Proceso,’ an icon of independent journalism since it began publication in the mid-1970s, reported several months ago that the Mexican army maintains files of personal data on the country’s journalists and intellectuals.

The stories about such a list unleashed a wave of complaints by journalists who declared they were victims of government-sponsored espionage.

Even so, organisations representing the communications media recognise the progress made in achieving greater press freedoms in Mexico.

The close ties between the government and the media had reached the point that in 1963 owners and franchise holders of 455 radio and television stations joined the ranks of the PRI en masse.