Mexico’s media put it in neutral

In the old days, working the news media during a Mexican presidential campaign was a pretty simple affair: The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party routinely pressured and/or bribed newspapers and radio and television stations to run stories favorable to the government. For the most part, the media complied in this symbiotic arrangement.

So airtight was the alliance between the major media and the political powers that be that during the 1988 presidential campaign, the main opposition candidate found it nearly impossible to break into the nightly news on the dominant Televisa network.

But over the last dozen years, changes in Mexican politics and society, combined with the imposition of new systems for monitoring media coverage, have significantly altered the way political candidates are treated by the country’s press, television and radio networks. Compared with previous presidential races, the major media’s coverage of this year’s campaign is more open, balanced and impartial, say a number of media analysts and electoral and party officials here.

“There has been a very important process of opening that has been consummated in the last six years, and I believe that now there are many more spaces of debate and of discussion than in the year 2000,” says Carmen Aristegui, a journalist who anchors her own nightly politics-oriented talk show “Aristegui” on CNN en Espanol. “I believe that in general, the ... [news media] have been more or less neutral.”

But while the media generally have grown more impartial, the candidates themselves seem to have become more aggressive in searching out whatever advantage they can obtain to boost their media profiles and lower their opponents’ images, perhaps because no single party has a monopoly on power anymore. The current campaign season, culminating with July 2 elections for president and both houses of congress, has seen a significant increase in the use of U.S.-style attack ads and other “negative” mass-media tactics that are relatively new in Mexico.

Earlier this spring, the negative campaign rhetoric ratcheted up between the candidates of the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, and the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, one of its two main rivals. The exchanges grew so harsh that a few weeks ago the Federal Electoral Institute known by its Spanish initials, IFE, mandated that both campaigns should pull their attack ads. But electoral officials have been slow to respond as negative ads surface, and the campaigns continue to test the IFE’s limits. Friday, IFE commissioners recommended that the two sides withdraw a whole new collection of ads.

In media coverage, some observers detect a tendency toward “sound-bite” journalism and sensationalistic coverage that focuses more on slander and squabbles among the candidates than on the issues. If campaign coverage is more equitable than before, they contend, it’s also getting coarser and cheesier -- particularly on radio and television, where most Mexicans get their news.

Major media outlets such as Televisa and TV Azteca are more interested in surface than substance, says Maria Elena Meneses Rocha, director of the journalism studies program at the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores in Monterrey, referring to the country’s two main television networks.

“The candidates have serious proposals, in economic questions, for example, social programs,” Meneses says. “Nevertheless, the media aren’t reflecting this. They only exalt the spectacle, the insults, the discrediting. And so the big national problems aren’t put on the table.”

Collectively, these changes have produced a contradictory media-political culture that is simultaneously more restricted and more free-wheeling, more responsible in some ways but in others more reckless, than in prior years.

“The role of media? It’s positive and negative at the same time,” says political analyst Sergio Aguayo Quezada. “Because there is no doubt that media has become a very important actor in terms of setting the agenda and overseeing the government and publications.”

Attack ads aplenty have flavored the campaigns of Felipe Calderon, the PAN candidate, and PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-leaning former Mexico City mayor known by his initials, “AMLO.” The two candidates have been running a close race in opinion polls, and with the election rapidly approaching, Lopez Obrador took the lead this week for the first time in months after hitting the airwaves with a barrage of ads suggesting that Calderon’s relatives got rich thanks to Calderon’s position in government.

The ads single out his brother-in-law who, they say, landed more than a dozen government contracts while Calderon was in office and paid no taxes on millions of dollars in profits. These charges, denied by Calderon, were first raised in a national debate and have since been hammered home in the ad campaign.

Calderon’s “anti-AMLO” ads, for their part, have described the former mayor as “a danger to Mexico” who is making empty promises to the poor about creating social programs that he won’t be able to pay for. Some ads have attempted to associate Lopez Obrador with Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chavez.

Early in the campaign, Lopez Obrador appeared to be caught off guard by Calderon’s attack ads, but after watching his front-runner status temporarily slip away this spring after he declined to participate in the first of two presidential debates, he countered with aggressive ads of his own, along with pointed criticism aimed at Calderon and President Vicente Fox.

Meanwhile, the Calderon campaign has made effective use of the Internet to launch e-mail criticisms of Lopez Obrador, analysts say. According to an IFE study, the Calderon campaign has spent $242,070 on Internet ads, more than that of any other presidential candidate.

“They have unleashed the worst campaign of hate and defamation that I have seen,” says Carlos Monsivais, one of Mexico’s most prominent intellectuals and a Lopez Obrador supporter. “I believe since the campaign against Francisco I. Madero in 1911, ’12 and ‘13, its equal hasn’t been seen.”

Calderon staffers counter that they are simply warning Mexicans about how an AMLO presidency could damage the country by imposing what they say would be reckless policies.

“The truth is that we are convinced ... that Mr. Lopez Obrador really is a danger to Mexico, from an economic sense, from a social sense, from a number of senses,” says Maximiliano Cortazar, communication general coordinator for Calderon’s campaign.

If the major media’s coverage of the fray has grown more equitable, that’s partly due to the uproars caused by elections past.

Public skepticism over the credibility and fairness of Mexico’s electoral system spiked during the hotly disputed 1988 presidential election, won by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated Mexican politics for 71 years. Media coverage of the subsequent presidential contest in 1994 was so lopsided that even the winning PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, later acknowledged the inequities.

Fallout from those two campaigns prompted the creation of a system to monitor media campaign coverage, both in terms of time allotted to individual candidates and the overall slant of the coverage. The IFE, a many-tentacled bureaucracy that also registers voters and oversees elections, was put in charge of the monitoring process.

This year, the electoral institute is keeping tabs on 600 radio and television stations in 35 cities that account for nearly 90% of Mexico’s total radio and television audience, says Andres Albo, president of the Commission of Oversight of the Political Parties.

Millions of hours of all types of programs are being taped, measured for length and evaluated according to whether their content is “positive,” “negative” or “neutral,” Albo says. Acknowledging that such categories can be subjective and difficult to quantify, he says that much of this content analysis is being done by IBOPE, a respected ratings and media research company that operates throughout Latin America.

The electoral institute is also monitoring campaign ads such as TV spots, billboards and bus cards. Albo says the various monitoring processes are the most extensive ever applied to a Mexican election season.

According to IFE statistics on the total number of seconds of radio and television news programs devoted to the top three of the five presidential candidates between Jan. 1 and April 30 -- Calderon, Lopez Obrador and the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo -- Lopez Obrador led the pack. However, Calderon had nearly three times as many campaign ads as Lopez Obrador, and Madrazo more than twice as many.

“In general terms, I would say that the media are trying to treat the candidates in a fair way,” Albo says. “For us, transparency is the path to arrive at equity.”

Carlos Flores Rico, spokesman for the Madrazo campaign, says that changes in the role of the media are being driven by several factors, including the escalating costs of presidential contests, a more competitive field of candidates than in decades past, and what he calls “the radicalization of the extremes” within the body politic, resulting in a more ideological race and the spread of attack ads.

Analyst Aguayo says that time allotted to the candidates by the major national media has been equitable on the whole. But he says that isn’t the case with the less-regulated state and regional television and radio stations, which he says have shown “a clear preference in terms of the time allotted in favor of Madrazo and Calderon. The figures are very clear.”

Aguayo believes negative campaign ads are “one of the worst aspects of American democracy.” Their adoption here could damage Mexico’s still-emerging democracy, he thinks. “Of course there had been negative campaigning” before this election, he says, “but not with the intensity and the brutality.”

As for how the barbs might ultimately land July 2, Aguayo says it’s too early to tell. “For the time being, negative campaigning seems to have been, not forgotten, but at least we have a truce in the war of mud.”