A Culture of Collusion

Few outsiders are fully aware of the complex relationship between the ostensibly independent news media in Mexico and the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party - a relationship that has been sustained by subsidies, bribery, fear of violence, and mutual political convenience. Leading Mexican and U.S. journalists examine this "culture of collusion" and portray how it is only now beginning to change. This groundbreaking collection of analytical essays features frank, first-hand accounts of overt subsidies, payoffs, and news-as-advertising budgets that keep most Mexican dailies dependent on government support; pressures on Mexican journalists covering the Chiapas uprising, political assassinations, and the presidential campaign of 1994: and changing methods of government coercion and co-opting of the news media before and after the Salinas administration. The authors also explore the financial and political interests of the strong-willed government loyalist who controls Mexican television news and the growing Mexican influence on Spanish-language news broadcasting in the United States. The outgrowth of a two-year investigative project by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), this study reveals a disturbing pattern of violence against journalists outside the capital city and includes brief CPJ case histories of eleven Mexican reporters who were murdered in mysterious circumstances over the past ten years.