Journalism in the hole
Following up on the theme of biases and weirdness in Mexican media, while in a taxi at a stoplight today, I got an issue of “Publimetro”, a free, ad financed city newspaper, which, according to one of the owners, is directed towards the middle classes and upwards. The mixture of getting their money exclusively from ads, making the readers not even the secondary customer, let alone the primary customer, and a focus on the moneyed elites, leads to some, shall we say, odd priorities in the editorial policies.
On page 17 of the 26 September issue, in the entertainment section, there’s an article of almost half a page, on En el hoyo being the Mexican documentary with the biggest box office of all time. It’s a big succcess, it’s possibly going to be Oscar nominated, it’s been in several festivals, and so on. A rather large article. But, there was a weird omission in the article. What’s the documentary about? After skimming it a couple of times, I noticed that it is indeed mentioned, in part of a sentence at the end of the first paragraph:
[...] the documentary, which looks at an aspect of everyday life in the city.
Hm, that’s awfully general. So, what’s the documentary really about? Well, I happened to know, and if you don’t, it’s easy to find out from the IMDB page, which says:
A portrait of the construction workers involved in building the second deck of Mexico City’s Periferico freeway.
Oh, that’s a lot more informative. I wonder why the paper doesn’t just say that?
Well, maybe it’s because the second deck of the Periferico was a successful project of Mexico City head of government Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who went on to be a leftist presidential candidate, and is currently arguing that he’s the real winner of July’s presidential elections, instead of conservative Felipe Calderón, favorite of the upper classes, who harbor a hate of López Obrador comparable to that of US republicans for Bill and Hillary Clinton. If you think it sounds weird to not mention a public works project just because of the politician who started it, think again. Miguel de Icaza mentioned people in his family who are conservative enough and hate López Obrador enough that they refuse to use the second deck of the Periferico, for exactly this reason.
It wouldn’t do to upset what Publimetro owner Antonio Torrado Monge calls “socieconomic levels A, B, and C”, now, would it, just to have an article that actually gives you some information about its main subject? Oh no. Wouldn’t do at all.
September 27th, 2006 at 2:43 am
[...] In other news, Joakim is taking the Mexican media to task for its political bias and general hilarity. Hopefully he’ll keep this up with regular instalments – it’s funny because it’s true. [...]
September 27th, 2006 at 9:25 am
I don’t have time right now to go into detail, but comparing López Obrador to the Clintons doesn’t go very far. They simply don’t have a lot in common.
September 27th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
maw: No, they’re not very similar at all, which is why I didn’t compare them. Rather, I compared the irrational hatred of many republicans of the Clintons to the irrational hatred of many upper-class PAN voters of AMLO.
That hatred is quite similar in many ways, both because it presupposes that the object of it is far more extreme left than their actions and policies indicate, because it seems to be a hatred that’s grown out of the object’s popularity with the masses, and because it seems to result in project every problem and fear of the haters onto the object. It’s largely emotional, not rational, and it’s extreme, to an extent not really justified by the political differences.
September 27th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Republicans’ dislike of Bill Clinton was mostly irrational. His presidency did not – and never seriously threatened to – upset the status quo. I think the real reason they disliked him was because he was so much smarter than they were (they have since gotten their collective ass in gear, although there’s reason to think that they’ve been slipping, badly, in the past year or so). There was a reason they called him Slick Willie, and it was not (just) because his willy was often, err, slick. He was, overall, quite pro-corporate, socially conservative, and so on, just like any other important US politician. But he repeatedly bamboozled his political opponents, and they did not like it. His detractors, however, didn’t lose much during his time in office; their hatred of Clinton was indeed irrational.
López Obrador, on the other hand, would be far more likely to upset the status quo if he were to ever become Mexico’s real president. His opponents are not necessarily irrational. (Well, the religious ones are by definition.) They might be bad people – indeed, many of them are – but being bad does not make one irrational. If I came out of Mexico’s inbred, elite class, I too would probably be against López Obrador, out of very rational self interest.
On the third hand, I think the hatred of Hilary Clinton is irrational because she is so irrelevant. There’s no way she’ll ever become president, and for all the same reasons that Gore and Kerry lost.
(PS: Your blog could really use a preview function. Editing more than two or three sentences of text in such a tiny box is for sucks.)