All the news that fits

Two news stories about the news this week.

One piece of good news.

Notimex reports (my loose translation) that what I’ve always thought was the best news and information programming in the country will be reaching a much wider audience:

President Calderon, speaking a a ceremony to  introduce a  new postage stamp honoring the 50th anniversary of Television Channel Eleven, announced that the Secretary of Gobernacion (the Home Secretary) and the Secretary of Communication and Transportation have agreed to transmit  the Mexico City public television station nationwide.

One troubling trend:

Cox Newspapers is closing its Mexico City bureau.  The “bureau” was basically Jeremy Schwartz, who wrote in his last column from Mexico City:

Since I arrived in Mexico in 2005, I’ve seen the foreign press corps dwindle. One longtime correspondent remarked that any gathering of reporters quickly assumes the air of a wake. I’ve seen the bureau closures of the San Antonio Express-News, Newsday and the San Diego Union-Tribune, seen the McClatchy chain’s position remain unfilled, and a significant reduction in the size of the Dallas Morning News bureau. Great journalists remain in Mexico, doing amazing work. But too many are nervous about their jobs.

Canal Onze, “Channel Eleven” was envisioned, like its sponsor, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, as a people’s institution. Canal Onze began as “popular education” … or at least education for the masses: plunking down a television camera in a classroom where a math professor … and zooming in on a blackboard… wasn’t all that “cutting edge,” but it was well in the spirit of IPN, founded in IPN 1936 as a “Revolutionary” institution that could both meet the needs of the masses not looking for an academic degree such as that offered by the other national university, UNAM, but needing the skills to succeed in a technically and economically changing world.

While there are programs like “Discovery Channel” or “Animal Planet” available in Mexico, they are only on cable, out of the financial reach of even most of the Mexican middle class. Canal Onze is hard to find outside Mexico City, but makes the animal and history shows available… and creates several programs specifically for Mexican audiences.

Oprah might be educational, but she’s a lightweight compared to Christina Pacheco, a well-known journalist and author as well as a talk-show hostess as likely to interview klezmer players, tortilla pounder and nobel prize winners with the same sense of respect for their work and importance.

And I admit having a big crush on Noticiero Nocturno news-reader, Adriana Pérez Cañedo.  Image Jim Leher channelling Rachel Maddow.  The only time I ever saw  Pérez lose her cool when when she was reading a news-script about the looting in Bagdad, where she had to read a quote from Donald Rumsfeld to the effect that there was no looting.  Pérez read the quote, crumpled the script, threw it at the camera, and apologized for insulting the intelligence of the viewers.  And went on with the broadcast.

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Compare Canal Onze — expanding its coverage and reach — with the U.S. media, which is shrinking, even domestically.  You would think a government financed station would have to toe the political line, just as a corporate one (or, like PBS in the United States, “underwritten with the financial support of… “) would be relatively tame.  But, Canal Onze is not directly a governmental body, but a University-owned one.  Universities, even technical universities like IPN,  are “autonomous bodies” in Mexico.  They have a constitutional right to funding, and to decide how they use those funds.  In other words, the government cannot censor the station by cutting it’s funds without also cutting the funds for the entire school… which would be political suicide.

And, while journalists are terribly paid in Mexico, they are broadly educated.  Although this creates some problems with those reporters who are paid by word count (like police reporters) trying to show off their language skills (and, alas, there is still a tendency within Latin American journalism to write in a euphemistic and allusive style, the top journalists — what in the U.S. would be the “inside the beltway” class, are very well educated men and women indeed.  Most base their reputation on their work as  historians or economists or social researchers, and journalism is simply what they do to pay the bills.

I don’t mean to imply that Mexican journalists are amateurs (that’s what we bloggers are accused of being!), but that even those who make journalism the focus of their working lives are not the “political class” as in the United States.  True, Televisa’s long-time CEO back in the PRI era, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, supposedly said, “Mexico …will never stop being fucked. Television has the obligation to bring diversion to these people and remove them from their sad reality and difficult future.” And, Azcárraga and his family did interfere with news on behalf of the PRI, but even the network’s news stars, like Jacobo Zubidovski, see their job as afflicting the comfortable more than comforting the afflicted these days.

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An astute, cankerkous, small town Texas writer (and, wiser than I, sticking to the news of a much smaller geographical area and a much smaller circle of usual suspects to make him cranky) always says, “bad journalism is better than no journalism”. We “amateurs — those of us who at least report on what’s being reported — may not be “bad journalists” and we may not even be, by some definitions, journalists. But we don’t see our job as removing you from the sad reality and difficult future,” but to prepare you to face it, or call on you to change it. The corporate media isn’t going to pay our bills, and we’re going to remain amateurs in that sense, but if you want even “bad journalism” we can use your support.