All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The Mexican presidential election was close. Real close. So close, in fact, that in the aftermath many in the media suggested that a replay of the 2000 US presidential election was in the making. But there was at least one key difference: Whereas the American media were overeager to call the 2000 election, most notably in Florida, the Mexican media held off in calling this one. Not that the apparent restraint had the people singing the praises of the press. As Latin American correspondent Dan Grech and Bob Garfield discussed on "On The Media" (no transcript 'til Wednesday – you'll have to listen), there was debate in Mexico about whether not calling the election was really a journalistic decision, or if it was actually all about politics.

As we've discussed before, Mexico has strict laws against disseminating opinion polls or campaign commercials in the run-up to an election, strict enough that Fox News decided to go off the air in the country until after the polls closed. There was a media blackout regarding the outcome from Wednesday at midnight until 8 pm Sunday, at which time Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute announced that the race was too close to call…and to check back in three hours. Grech, knowing he was in for a long night, decided to nap. When he checked back in at 11, the news was the same – we don't know yet. In the intervening three hours, no media outlets said anything substantial about the results, sticking to the line that it was just too close.

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Fox News is going on vacation in Mexico.

As Matea Gold reports, "Fox News Channel is going off the air in Mexico in advance of Sunday's presidential election to steer clear of that country's restrictions on campaign ads and public surveys, cable channel executives said Wednesday."

In Mexico, it's against the law to disseminate opinion polls or campaign commercials in the run-up to an election, so the channel went off the air today and will remain that way until Sunday.

"I just don't think we had much choice," Janet Alshouse, senior vice president of international distribution for Fox News, told Gold. "We can't restrict our coverage."

CNN International and CNN en Espanol plan will remain on the air, however.

Here's Gold's breakdown: "Mexican law prohibits the broadcast or publication of opinion surveys in the eight days leading up to an election, as well as any campaign activities in the three days before the vote. In a memo to Fox News, government officials said that electoral law also prohibited the discussion of citizens' political preferences and analysis of candidates' weaknesses on the air in the days before the election."

It's hard to say what's going on here – wouldn't CNN be engaging in the same type of coverage as Fox News? Why is it not an issue for them?

In any event, I can see the appeal of keeping opinion surveys and campaign ads off the air in the run-up to the election, and even of restricting "analysis of candidates' weaknesses," which on cable news can turn ugly. But it's hard to get behind a law that forces a news outlet to either alter the nature of its coverage or simply go off the air.

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It's hard to come across this headline and not be a little taken aback: "Mexico To Legalize Cocaine, Heroin Use."

That's right – according to yesterday's stories, "Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign into law a measure that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs for personal use." ("Other drugs include LSD and methamphetamines.) The specifics of the measure are complex – this story gets into it pretty well – but considering the peg, it struck me as a pretty huge story. After all, think of the implications: A possible rise in casual drug use in the US and Mexico, not to mention an upswing in Mexican "drug tourism." And let's not even get into what it means for spring break.

I wasn't alone in thinking the story was big: It was the most e-mailed story at the Los Angeles Times Web site. But it did not get a ton of play in general. Sure, those hippies over at the Huffington Post were all over it, but the story was either buried or nowhere to be found on most of the news sites I checked in the early afternoon yesterday. On CBSNews.com, according to Senior Producer Dan Collins, the story was on the home page for most of the morning, and was ranked No. 1 in the "World" section, before eventually being cycled off the home page. That's more play than it seemed to get elsewhere, but it still didn't strike me as a lot.

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CBSNews.com is running an AP story about how Mexican reporters, "frustrated by fruitless police probes of slain and missing journalists," are making a stand by publishing reports on the cases.

It's very difficult to report on crime in many parts of Mexico, like Nuevo Laredo, where, as I noted in March, local newspapers recently played down a story about a deadly shooting. "If we publish it, we die," one local editor told the San Antonio Express-News.

Monday's article, which was run simultaneously in more than 100 Mexican papers, focused on the disappearance of a 26-year-old named Alfredo Jimenez Mota, who covered drug trafficking in the border town of Hermosillo, Sonora, near Arizona. The story named families tied to drug trafficking and pointed to evidence indicating Jimenez' likely abductor. It also suggested that police may have had something to do with his disappearance.

The AP reports that Mexican journalists hope that their decision to publish the story simultaneously will protect them from revenge attacks.

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We like to think that, in America, the press is free to put out true stories without fear of reprisal. And for the most part it is – though not always, as Boston Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis acknowledged in explaining that one of the reasons his paper did not run the Prophet Muhammad cartoons was "[o]ut of concern for the safety of the people who work in this building." Still, after reading this San Antonio Express-News story by Mariano Castillo, it's hard not to think we don't fully appreciate how good we have it.

In violent Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, two state police officers were killed in what Castillo calls "the deadliest shootout in recent memory." There were five killings there in total on Thursday, all likely related to drug trafficking. But most local newspapers barely gave the story any play, opting to print brief, anonymous stories of less than 200 words.

There's a simple reason why, according to one local editor: "If we publish it, we die." He continued: "The bottom line is that we have to protect the safety of all our reporters and their families."

The papers have gotten a number of threatening phone calls over the last two years, and editors have decided that putting out the story isn't worth dying for. "The reality is that we're in a situation where there is no freedom to publish," said one.

The decision to at least run the story was a small stand against the threats, but Castillo says that for most editors "publishing the story felt less like an act of defiance and more like a retreat from the journalistic standards they want to give their readers" because it got such limited exposure.

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