In one of the most tense moments in press-government relations, but as a challenge to the consolidation of investigative and analytical journalism, a group of young businessmen and professional journalists will circulate the printed newspaper El Independiente starting on Tuesday, March 1 , without any connection with the frustrated project of businessman Carlos Ahumada.
The name was made available to the National Copyright Institute and was acquired directly and the trademark right was purchased from its previous owners. The author of Political Indicator, who was interim director of El Independiente in 2004 before it was closed, will be the general director of the new project that will respond to the need to rescue plurality in the media and accompany society in what should be a second and deeper transition to democracy.
The new newspaper will open its doors to journalists and analysts from all ideological currents to avoid the partiality of the situation and to offer readers an open interpretive scenario of the plurality of Mexican journalistic thought.
Likewise, the new El Independiente will avoid the pitfalls of biased confrontation and will try to show that there is a dynamic, alive and expectant country outside the National Palace, outside the mornings and outside the figure of the President of the Republic. The media fell into the reduced space of personal confrontation, despite the fact that the country has a series of national issues that require observation and journalistic analysis until now marginalized in the pages of the written media.
The direction and administration of The Independent will collect nothing from the conflicts of the past, with the exception of the commitment included in the name. The role of the press as a critical observer of reality has been limited by the confrontational activism of journalistic collaborators who represent interest groups involved in the dispute over political power.
The recent history of journalism shows that in the period 1968-2000, the paper press was key in the Mexican transition process from an authoritarian regime to one with better –albeit incomplete– democratic rules, it contributed to the destruction of the old system presidentialist like the statue of Lenin and the PRI like the Berlin wall of the authoritarian PRI political system.
The democratic transition of 2000 was lost in the inability of President Fox and his collaborators to understand the tasks of building a new system/regime/state, in the lack of a democratizing project by Calderón and in the restoration of the neoliberal Salinist PRI with Peña grandson. The new alternation of 2018 was caught up in the maelstrom of a social-popular project, the deterioration of the PRI-PAN-PRI model, and the ravages of the pandemic that broke out in 2020.
Right now, the press finds itself in a narrow and unfavorable space of tense dialogue with the president of the republic, but neglecting its function of critical observation of the entire Mexican reality. Outside the National Palace there is a republic that is waiting to debate its reality in order to find ways out of a complicated general crisis that has its explanation in the failure of the PAN and the PRI to build and move towards a republic of laws and institutions.
The plurality of collaborators of El Independiente will determine the will of its editors and directors to give priority to analysis, get out of the confrontation with institutional powers and propose needs and options that help redirect republican viability without drowning in confrontations with institutional powers. . In the period of the first transition 1968-2000, the press demonstrated its ability to play a key role in the deactivation of the PRI’s authoritarian and repressive regime. The partisan alternation in the presidency of the republic in 2000, 2012 and 2018 could not exist without the critical and proactive dynamism of the paper press, since the electronic press has been the operating arm of the corporate interests of the owners of the concessions. of radio and television.
The Independent will open channels of circular communication with society to incorporate it as the central objective of his task, the renewal and construction of that republic of laws and institutions that has been a liability and a debt of the frustrated transition.
policy for dummies: politics has in the press a vital space for democratic debate.
The content of this column is the sole responsibility of the columnist and not the newspaper that publishes it.
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