Beyond Exogenous Models: Mexican Journalism’s Modernization in its Own Terms

ABSTRACT

Mexican journalism scholars have resorted to exogenous models of the press to study this country’s news production. This has imported standards developed abroad and has hindered the analysis of Mexican journalism in its own terms. In order to reverse this trend, this article develops an inductive approach focused on the organizational discourses which gave form to Mexican journalism’s modernization. Identifying the development of the “prensa vendida” (sold-out press) stigma as a key public discourse, it exposes how different journalists and journalism entrepreneurs created diverse paradigm repairs with the intention of overcoming Mexican journalism’s credibility crisis. Through a multiple modernities perspective, it shows how these organizational discourses and paradigm repairs reproduce, resist and reconfigure the liberal model of the press’ norms, standards and values. This article could contribute to transitional journalism studies at large as it presents a theoretical framework and a research design for them to go beyond the normative perspectives embedded in exogenous models of the press.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• modernization
• multiple modernities
• paradigm repair
• Mexico
• transitional journalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The “prensa vendida” stigma was developed during the 1968 student movement. Students chanted against the press claiming that it was biased towards political elites. This idea was reinforced by the Tlatelolco massacre, as the students felt that the press privileged the official framing of this event instead of reporting it objectively.

2 Hughes (2003) defined “civic journalism a la Mexicana” as one of the paths of change in Mexican journalism. She claimed that the interaction with civil society is what characterized this modernization process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología: [Grant Number Postdoctoral Scholarship 2018-000005-01NACV-00127].