Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico (review)

In recent years, political scientists have moved beyond the examination of elections and governing pacts to study many of the additional institutional requirements for democracy in the Third World such as a free press. Chappell H. Lawson argues convincingly that "media opening and democratization are . . . best conceived as interacting and mutually reinforcing processes" (p. 6). In the case of Mexico, Lawson finds that the opening of the media, both print and electronic, did not emerge as a result of political liberalization. Instead, over the years between the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 and the election of Vicente Fox as president in 2000, changing journalistic norms, market competition, and the protagonism of civil society transformed the Mexican media into a major cause of the country's political liberalization.

In its early chapters, Building the Fourth Estate provides an excellent account of how the regimes of the Partido Institucional Revolucionario governed with the collusion of a largely privately owned, but thoroughly domesticated media. Through subsidies, advertising, licensing, newsprint control, payments to journalists, and other devices, including the occasional use of force, government functionaries ensured that the mass media articulated the official view of the public agenda, avoided sensitive topics such as corruption, drug trafficking, or repression, and provided the PRI decidedly partisan electoral coverage.

The increasing diversification and urbanization of Mexican society combined with the government's notorious failings over the last third of the twentieth century to undermine this cozy relationship between the communications media and officialdom. The print media became the first to change as some newspaper and magazine journalists such as Julio Scherer ventured into previously prohibited topics that challenged the government's monopoly over the public agenda. Government attempts at retaliation backfired in the long run. President Luis Echeverría Alvarez's forced expulsion of Scherer from the Mexico City daily Excélsior in 1976 ultimately resulted in the creation of the enormously popular weekly Proceso and in the migration of a talented cadre of journalists to other media outlets, where they spread an enterprising spirit of journalistic independence.

Over time, publishers began to discover that journalistic assertion could prove to be good business, both in provincial cities such as Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mérida, as well as in Mexico City. After President José López Portillo withdrew government advertising from critical publications in 1982, declaring "no pago para que me peguen," his media adversaries discovered how to make market competition work to their advantage, thereby strengthening their independence. Radio outlets and, by the early 1990s, even television followed the lead of print media into more diversified journalism. Forthright coverage of electoral competition, political scandals, or disasters such as the 1985 Mexico City earthquakes or the 1992 Guadalajara gasoline explosion all boosted sales. The increasing activism of Mexican civil society provided the mass media both new subject matter and new markets.

Lawson's analysis credits the two factors of market competition among the media and the interplay between the media and civil society with generating a new political discourse favoring democratization. Somewhat inexplicably, Lawson leaves the 1994 Chiapas uprising almost entirely out of his discussion of events in Mexico around which this new discourse formed. Equally unfortunately, his analysis stops with the 1997 elections. Most of his secondary references and all of his interviews occur in that year or earlier. Building the Fourth Estate would have benefited from an epilogue looking at the mass media in Mexican society in subsequent events such as the 2000 elections and the controversies over the ownership of Channel 40. Equally useful would have been some further discussion of the relationship between democratic governance and the rise of sensationalist "yellow" journalism that Lawson notes as a feature of the opening of the electronic media.

Despite these deficiencies, some occasional contradictory...