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From the Inside Out: How Institutional Entreprenuers Transformed Mexico’s Newsrooms Sallie Hughes [email protected] University of Miami 2002 Working Paper #2 From The Inside Out: How Institutional Entrepreneurs Transformed Mexico’s Newsrooms By Sallie Hughes Assistant Professor The University of Miami [email protected] Paper prepared for The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Miami Beach, FL 8 August 2002 Copyright protected under Sallie Hughes. Permission to cite should be directed to the author. 1 Introduction Over the last two decades, the Mexican press changed the way it presented citizens and politicians. Newspapers transformed the image of Mexicans from people who passively petitioned for government favors, or were victimized by disasters and crime, into citizens who took an active role in shaping their lives. At the same time, the central figure of Mexican authoritarianism, the imperial presidency, became increasingly challenged in the news pages by opposition voices inside and outside of formal political institutions. In doing so, the press began to support the creation of an authentic “public sphere” in Mexico in which citizens have access to diverse political information that allows them to form reasoned political opinions and make successful demands upon their governors.1 In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, where political participation and government accountability are low, a form of journalism with the potential to empower citizens should be called civic. The civic approach considers news and the journalists who produce it as facilitators of citizen participation in politics and, specifically, in holding their governments accountable. Journalists bring pressure to bear on governments by providing citizens with information in a form that encourages reasoned opinion and thoughtful participation. Focusing on the potential of journalism to enable democratic citizenship highlights the media’s role in consolidating newly democratic systems, which frequently suffer from a lack of accountability, selective citizenship rights, and low rates of participation. That makes it useful for analyzing news media in a wide range of evolving political systems, which often are lumped in the “democratic category,” but may demonstrate high levels of clientelism, corruption and state paternalism. Using the civic focus rather than labeling journalism “democratic,” as some journalists themselves have done in Latin America, helps distinguish between the variety of claims to the definition of democracy by centering the definition on broader participation and accountability. Democratization research until the mid-1990s was dominated by procedural approaches defining democracies only by the switch key of competitive elections as developing countries perfected the “hardware” of elections, but often neglected how to develop the “software” – the institutions – that create participatory citizens, accountable governments and effective governance. In the civic vision of participatory democracy, free and engaged media are in fact part of the definition of democracy, for without them, citizens could not govern through their representatives. The theory and values guiding a loose movement of civic journalists who emerged in Mexico in the 1980s are similar to those of the more-formalized civic or public journalism movement that in the United States, which itself has roots in the public service theory of journalism in society. The context of the movement’s emergence in Mexico was different, however. Emergence in an authoritarian setting made the Mexican variant less cohesive as a movement and more oriented toward stimulating citizen participation rather than direct 1 This information comes from an analysis of 822 news items presented on a random sample of front pages in four Mexico City newspapers from 1980 to 2000. For more information on the results and methodology, see Sallie Hughes, Culture Clash in the Newsroom. Journalists, the Media and the Democratization of Mexico (N.D., Tulane University, 2001). See the following for a concise definition and discussion of the “public sphere4” concept. Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas M. Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 136-42. 2 participation of journalists in organizing tasks. While some U.S. journalists, in combination with intellectuals, experimented with ways to increase participation in elections and civic organizations in the United States, in Mexico, journalists’ main objective was to make political participation meaningful. They did this by giving citizens the information they needed to form political parties and other civic organizations outside the reach of the single-party state and to demand that free and fair elections replace charade contests. To do this required a shift in the value structure of journalists from one supporting the status quo of a Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime to one that supported democratization.2 The civic path was not the only one followed by the Mexican media, however. An interaction between the creation of a new professional identity and societal-level transformation of politics and the economy dissolved a consolidated, authoritarian media institution and replaced it with a hybrid news system in which civic, market-driven and inertial authoritarian models of news production competed for hegemony. Some news organizations remained “frozen” in a traditional, authoritarian culture. Other organizations controlled by managers willing to trade newsroom autonomy for commercial gain followed a market-driven path. The authoritarian press concept, a form of which was institutionalized in Mexico from the 1940s to the 1980s, is subordinate to the regime, passively accepts information provided by the state, and presents only its views. As the authoritarian political system which ruled Mexico dissipated, two new, competing models of journalism emerged. In the civic-oriented model, practiced by a growing population of newspapers, journalists are autonomous from powerful actors, assertive in their search for the news, and diverse in their presentation of views of the regime. The rival of civic journalism in the newly democratic, market-based economy of the 1990s became a form of journalism that can be called market-driven. Market-driven journalism is not autonomous from powerful actors, and presents diverse views of the regime or assertively seeks news only when such behavior furthers commercial goals. The first two models best describe the struggle for hegemony occurring in the Mexican press, while the market-driven model is most apparent in Mexican television. Table one lays out these models, which are based upon the theoretical press systems literature and the mental models of journalism as expressed by more than 150 Mexican journalists in interviews or survey questionnaires from 1999 to 2002. This paper examines one part of the transformation of Mexican journalism, how some newspapers shifted from an authoritarian approach toward a civic-oriented model of news production. It argues that the way to understand why and how civic journalism gained a foothold in Mexico is to look from inside the organization outward as an institutional theorist would rather than from the outside in as would a political economist. A researcher using the approach of theorists of organizations and institutions would consider the instrumental cues and political culture in the macro environment of news production, but center them in the news 3 organization, its hierarchy and its particular culture. 2 For a review of the civic movement in the United States, see Tanni Haas, "What's "Public" About Public Journalism? Public Journalism and the Lack of a Coherent Public Philosophy," Communication Theory 9, no. 3 (1999). Peter Parisi, "Toward a Philosophy of Framing: News Narratives for Public Journalism," Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (1998): 673 speaks of the values shift necessary for the creation of a public journalism movement in the United States. 3 This discussion is informed by a long literature on organizations and institutions from management theorists and organizational sociologists. For an application of this work to the mass media of the United States, see Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News. The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: The University of Chicago 3 Table One: Competing News Models Autonomous Assertive Diverse Civic Yes Yes Yes Authoritarian No No No Market-Driven No Instrumental Instrumental Communications researchers have long focused on news media as organizations for production, but less often as an institution.4 Researchers who focus on the theory of organizations and institutions have sought to explain stability and change in a wider range of institutions. They acknowledge distinct levels of institutions: the individual organization, a level of broad societal institutions and a mid-level institution, the organizational field.5 Institutional theorists focus not only on the effect of coercive rule systems and laws on institutional change, but also on the importance of perceived legitimacy, normative acceptability and orthodoxy that are socially constructed by the shared normative and cognitive frameworks of people acting within institutions. Coercive, formal rules in this case might not be what are guiding members of a particular institution, but rather unwritten, informal rules perceived as appropriate or the “normal way of doing things.”

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