It no longer matters if he talks about medicine, megaprojects, baseball or whatever, he always ends up insulting a journalist, an intellectual or a media outlet. The president goes for three weeks of daily references to the union, escalating his rhetorical virulence and defining positions as if they were battlefields that mark him and his unconditional fans. In his Manichaeism, those who do not see Mexico and the world from the same perspective are traitors, enemies of the Homeland, against whom he systematically encourages his lynching. Hatred and vengeful salivation is overtaking the digital world and hastening its way into the real world. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, from the merciless defense of his son, has fixed the “enemy” that he wants to crush: the independent press.
The president is not alone. Morena’s benches in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, terrified loudspeakers of López Obrador, repeat that there is a media campaign against him. Her echo, the diminished head of government of Mexico City, lobbies her peers to satisfy the boss. Armies and partisans have been formed. The snipers, who are not virtual, shoot from benches and seats. In the Supreme Court of Justice, where the president has more and more allies, they tighten the turnstile with absurd rulings in apparent defense of the rights of the audience, which in practice means censorship.
Liberties in Mexico are going through a bad time. It is an asymmetrical struggle that is being experienced, where the president erroneously defines the media, journalists and intellectuals as his opponents. The media are part of the public arena, defined by Jürgen Habermas in 1962, but which underwent a profound revolution since the early years of this century due to new technologies, which took it to a horizontal plane, breaking verticality and the old categories that established that the media defined what to think about. That hierarchy exploded into pieces, but López Obrador took up the dialectics of those years with enormous vigor, the conquest of minds through the construction of consensus.
What remains, despite everything, are the principles of freedom, which the president does not like, and who is hindered by those who dissent, criticize, and who consider that his national project is bad or that, simply, they are not a copy of his thought. Is there anything wrong with it? For him, yes. You can understand his exasperation. He designed his morning sessions as a government space where he monopolizes the microphone and tries to set the agenda every day, as it was with the old model of agenda setting, in a different format, but he loses.
The latest monitoring report on the morning of the SPIN Political Communication Workshop, released on Tuesday at the end of the 788th year, indicates that only six percent of the main front-page news (298 of a total of 4,780) of the seven newspapers with the largest national circulation, took up what the president had raised as the main topic of conversation. La Jornada, where several of its editorial staff, moneros and columnists are an organic part of the government and personal advisers to the president, was the one that most took up the issues proposed by López Obrador, but even so there were few, 86. Excelsior followed with 64, Milenio with 52, El Financiero with 32, Reforma with 26, El Universal with 21 and El Economista with 17. What these data tell us is that the conversation has not been mainly carried out by the president in his six-year term, but by the press.
The low diffusion of their messages can be explained by the fact that they are monolithic, and it is almost always the same as always. Systematic repetition is efficient in propaganda and to nest the seed in people’s minds, but since it is not news information -among its elements it includes that it is something new for the majority, or unpublished or surprising, or also a brilliant idea- , is discarded. SPIN shows the monotony of the discourse, in terms of news: in the morning the word corruption has been mentioned six thousand 172 times; two thousand 329 the word conservative or its derivatives; 222 times racism or racist; 129 coup or coup, and 127 classist or classism.
The president has repeated 53 times that “he who owes nothing fears nothing”, but his skin is much more delicate than he presumes. He bears very little criticism, because he is convinced that only he is right. His obsession with his transformation is explained in his own private definition of what it means: that power sits in one person. He does not share it, as happens in a democracy and forces negotiation, nor does he accept, as in a truly democratic order, that there is disagreement. His stubbornness is violent, which explains the fearful silence of his cabinet, his collaborators and his party, when facing the media and journalists.
Not like that, president. If you think he’s right, argue and don’t insult, persuade but don’t attack. Confront your ideas because the country is not in the sociopolitical conditions to process your attacks on the media and its journalists. On his back he already carries 47 murders of journalists, and he has barely exceeded half of his six-year term, and his example has infected satraps, such as the governors of Veracruz and Puebla, putting everyone’s life at risk.
The press should not see her as their enemy. She could have been an efficient vehicle for scaffolding her transformation, but for subjective reasons and prejudice, she confronted her from the start by never understanding her judgmental nature. She started against some, and in three weeks she already added many. We know that her vision will not change, but she could change the tone and reduce the confrontation. Let’s clarify. The responsibility belongs to everyone, but much depends on the initiative taken by the president. If he wants to drown us, he can’t expect anyone to at least try to kick.
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