To journalism in Mexico it rains in the wet. A president who attacks you every day and a digitized world in which no one wants to pay for information, which is now free. The first, the presidential bellicosity, has shattered the supposed spirit of impartiality and balance that journalism would have to profess; the second, the blogosphere and social networks, have jeopardized the very notion of the journalistic profession. During the last 150 years, information has been a commodity generated and distributed by the media and journalists who have made a living from it, like any other sector valued by society. But that business model has collapsed now that everything is circulating on social networks and each person has become an informer and opinion maker in the real world. It seems to me that Mexican journalism is responding in the wrong way to this double crisis. And if we do not correct it in time, we will be accelerating our own obsolescence.
On the one hand there is the problem of political polarization. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is convinced that the criticisms of his person and his government, aired in the media, are due to spurious reasons: the defense of privileges by the elites and the annoyance due to the lost advertising games. And to the extent that AMLO interprets these attacks as an immoral defense by conservatives who oppose pro-poor change, he feels obliged to exercise a right of reply to counter-argue, clarify confusion, dispel lies and slander. From his perspective, that justifies dedicating a good part of the morning conference to disqualifying the media and making lists of good and bad journalists. The president does not seem to be aware of the disproportion that the sovereign’s power represents vis-à-vis a columnist or a newspaper at which he directs his anger or mockery.
To say that this has led to a strained relationship is an understatement. Both have become reciprocal vomiting pens. On other occasions I have elaborated on the reasons why this polarization is harmful to the president himself, among other things because it fosters mistrust that destroys the investment environment necessary to generate the jobs required by the poor who are defended by the Government.
But the damage that the press itself does to itself is not minor. Faced with the presidential attacks, information professionals have become “deprofessionalized” and that ultimately undermines our reason for being. Columns, front pages of newspapers and radio and television newscasts have become an inventory of everything that could question the image and performance of the Government. In some cases it simply consists of a unilateral compilation of information (only that which is harmful to AMLO); in other worse ones, there is a decontextualized or biased treatment to show the nefarious character of the Fourth Transformation.
There are reasons for López Obrador to feel irritated by the way the press treats him, but that does not justify a personal obsession against the media and journalists. In the same way, there are reasons for newspapers and columnists to feel aggrieved in the face of the attacks of power, but that does not justify becoming a political activist. If we give in to temptation and drift towards a partisan and partisan press, we stop being chroniclers and betray our reason for being: reporting on the contradictions of reality, communicating the community with itself in all its diversity, forming an inclusive public opinion and tolerant of the different national projects that a society houses.
We complain about the fact that Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not know how to be president of all Mexicans and governed essentially for what he calls his people. It would be wrong for columnists, press and communicators to do the same and report only what coincides with what our audiences think. That is, selecting the information for only those who think like us.
It is not a question of pretending to be objective and impartial, because any reading of reality, even to inform, involves a form of interpretation. That has always been the case. But at least try to do journalistic work based on the professional codes that have always protected us so as not to do politics or propaganda in the task of reporting: to verify, to account for the various versions that everything has done, to offer contexts.
We have not come out very well from the second challenge either. If, in the case of López Obrador’s attack, the press made a mirror image and ended up polarized on the opposite sidewalk; In the threat posed by social networks, we also end up imitating them, becoming a similar version with the exception that we do it on the old platforms. The journalistic investigation, the approach to the transcendent subjects, the moderation in the treatment of the information, gave rise to the stridency and negativism that characterize the blogosphere, the infotainment, the frivolity and the morbid. “Vende” is more of a sensationalist note loaded with adjectives and built on the knees than a background report; An opinion column full of summary disqualifications that are tied with hatred and passions is more successful than another that tries to clarify or understand the true nature of those passions.
In short, at a time when journalism is up against the wall, not only because of the polarization that politicizes us, but also because of the vulgarization that frivolizes us, we would have to review the journalism that we are doing. Never like now has the world needed “curators”, notaries of reality that allow to account for what is important and transcendent, so that the community understands the problems it faces and is in a position to make the best decisions.
If the journalistic trade is to survive, it will do so by staying true to the premises that made it just that, a trade. But we will not achieve it if we follow the fashion of imitating social networks just because they are popular or become, just because power offends us, into one more political actor in the task of insulting and disqualifying. All that is left over on social networks and it’s free. If we want to prevail, we would have to return to good journalism, subject to the codes that made this task a dignified and socially necessary profession.
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