Media Systems in Unconsolidated Democracies: The Case of Mexico

In a transitional regime, the media, like many other important actors, have the possibility of making decisions about their behavior, within certain structural limits. In Mexico, during the liberalization process and the first governmental alternation (2000–2018), most of the mainstream media chose to maintain clientelistic exchanges with political actors instead of pressing for democratic consolidation through a more professional transformation of their informational practice. The outcome: high diversity of media with their independence subject to the economic and political interests of owners and publishers, that strongly distorted the reporting and surveillance functions of journalism in general. Neither have things improved during the second government alternation (2018), since in Mexico’s democracy, still lacking in effective mechanisms of accountability, the greatest risk to information independence comes from both the government and a media environment in which, with notable exceptions, many mainstream media have kept the same unprofessional practices of reporting as before.