Abstract
Faced with the complicated, challenging, and violent reality which has accompanied Mexican journalism since its beginnings, how can we understand its persistent, bold, but also tragic and controversial development? Part of the answer to such a disturbing question may be discovered, surprisingly, on the cover of the book Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico, edited by Paul Gillingham, associate professor of History at Northwestern University; Michael Lettieri, Fellow at the Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego; and Benjamin Smith, reader of Latin American history at the University of Warwick.
“Love the hard way” (Amor a la Brava) announces one of the headlines of the torn page of the newspaper which the man holds in his hands in the photograph of Nacho López, which illustrates this diverse publication. This fierce and stubborn love which some journalists and media profess and which Power in its diverse manifestations succeeds on occasion to tame and to pervert, is what animates the distinctive development of the Mexican press.
The causes, actions, reactions, media, personalities, and consequences of this almost intrinsic tension between Journalism and Power, whether it calls itself political, economic, criminal, or today technological, are explicated through the road map in which the editors of Journalism, Satire and Censorship put together fourteen appealing chapters. Their authors, recognized scholars and journalists, contribute from their battle positions—through studies of particular periods and cases—to answer the question formulated at the beginning.
This plethora of U.S. and Mexican specialists reveals the intricate, mysterious forces that have blocked and threatened the freedom of the press and as a result the development of democracy in Mexico. Therefore, the introduction to this volume asserts that to understand modern Mexico, it is essential to know the unique history of its press.
Beyond offering a new historical perspective, the confluence of distinct views, knowledges, and focuses that make up Journalism, Satire and Censorship in Mexico enables us to understand how the complex century-old relationship between media and power has evolved, in which old practices of coercion have been entrenched, like censorship, which have tried to subdue, with carrots and sticks, the watchdog postulated by political theory.
The reading of this book, in which an extensive work of documentation stands out, transports us to notable episodes that testify to the pressures and abuses to which journalists and media have succumbed, resisted, and responded with valor and creativity. It also reminded me of my time in the newsroom of Excelsior, “The newspaper of national life,” a protagonist in the recent history of Mexican journalism.
As editors Gillingham, Lettieri, and Smith affirm, “The history of the Mexican press does not, in fact, conform to any of the standard plots.” Certainly this is true, and to a large extent it is because the history of Mexican politics is equally distinctive, if not to say Kafkaesque. But independent of the Mexican case, we can add that after two centuries, the tense relationship between the press and political power has not changed.
In 1787, 4 years before the First Amendment of the United States Constitution became effective, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Nevertheless, during his second term as president, in 1807, his view on the press changed: “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
To that last phrase, many of our current presidents would subscribe. But even if the press has bad press, today it is more necessary than ever. As the journalist Ignacio Ramonet, for many years editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, warns, society today confronts a new form of censorship: the excess of information which obscures that which is meaningful, relevant, and transcendent. For this we need modern commentators who can interpret a complex reality, who orient citizens, and who regulate and serve, with freedom and responsibility, contemporary institutions and society.