The newspaper El Independiente celebrates its first year of existence in the midst of one of the several decisive stages of the country’s political life from the popular and unorganized protests of 68 by students and middle classes affected by the social underdevelopment. The central nucleus of the newspaper comes from the dissident practices in Excelsior and The Day of the seventies, went through the reorganization of the media due to the presidential maneuvers against Julio Scherer Garcia in 1976 and reached the crisis of electoral legitimacy of 1988. The 2000 of alternation as a frustrated and betrayed process of transition to democracy in the pathetic and PRI figure of Vicente Fox Quesada cannot be understood without the critical journalism that undermined the foundations of authoritarian presidentialism to show it as the naked king and showed that behind the PRI he was Wizard of Oz with their blaring horns.
The partisan alternation in 2000 never understood the role of the critical press and fox I disdain her despite the efforts of her then spokesperson and private secretary Alfonso Durazo Montano to build a new model of uncontrolled political communication. Calderon reproduced the model of political control of the media and forced them to state force to submit to the security crisis that is now known to have carried the poison of compromises with organized crime. And the PRI return of Peña grandson He restored the old Mexican model of distributing money without control and the perversion of his political communication team did not prevent the collapse of his image due to the cases of the White House, Ayotzinapa and scandalous corruption.
Despite the role of the press in delegitimizing the PRI regime, the president’s communication model Lopez Obrador It was centralized in the presidential figure and in the closing of the publicity sources, but without any project of construction of a new political discourse, although allowing the most absolute freedom of expression that the country has known since the Constitution of 1917.
But not all the fault has been of power in its different expressions; from the experiences of relative autonomy in the same 68 and later, the written media –which have been, for better or worse, the expression democratic of the society— they could never build a social model business that would allow them to avoid their dependence on the official advertisingwith the aggravating circumstance that the opposition parties to the PRI They used the press as a battering ram but never even thought that they should rebuild the industrial viability of the media.
With a journalistic radio in danger of extinction and a television in the traditional model of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class –PRI, PAN or Morena–the spaces for political debate returned to the written media, but the financial infeasibility found the digital space as a way out, although falling into the trap of avoiding analysis by sustaining an unbridled, disorderly and distorted criticism that has not been able to shape a true public opinion in so much so that it has not identified its readers.
El Independiente wanted to return to plural journalism, not exempt from stridency, but essential for one of the fundamental tasks of all communication media: the construction of citizenship, including unmasking the false prophets of democracy that they hide -such as the INE current–interests of political militancy that have the stink of the old model of PRI system/regime/State and his old associations with the business right.
The crisis of citizenship has been deepened by the return of the model priista-panista of subordination and the old scheme of assume society as a mass and not as a class. The problem of the current media has as a referent the dissolution of the parties as Social Organizations based on a ideology and a project and his conversion in mere employment agency offices. The parties have forgotten the debate of ideas, the role of political education of the media writings and of the social function of the critical journalism and revealing secrets
If the current agenda is one of transition from Mexico to one Republic of laws and institutionsthe reconstruction of citizenship has to go through a new political education that it is not in the parties, nor on television, nor in the militancy, but in the written press that would have to recover the space that was taken from it by the digital domain.
Politics for dummies: Politics assumes the written press as part of the polis.
The content of this column is the sole responsibility of the columnist and not of the newspaper that publishes it.
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