Early Lessons on Censorship and on Competing Concepts of the Press: Student Journalism in Mexico’s Transition to Democracy

Abstract

La Catarina was the student newspaper of the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla (UDLAP), one of Mexico’s most exclusive colleges. Since the publication’s foundation, in 2000, it served both as a lab for journalism students and as a forum for the college community. While editorially independent, occasional calls from the administration reminded journalists that some issues had better be avoided. Mexico was transitioning from 71 years of one-party rule to the presidency of opposition candidate Vicente Fox, and the Mexican press, too, was walking on a tightrope. The closing down of La Catarina caused protests of students and faculty, caught the attention of domestic and international media, and it was denounced by press freedom NGOs. By mid-2007, some 50 professors had been fired for protesting, including the near entirety of the Communication department. By offering their own direct testimony, the authors chronicle the closure of La Catarina and analyze how the conflict became so tense that it left little or no room for negotiation. Especially in terms of concepts of the press—and, therefore, of models to teach journalism—two competing models clashed fiercely. On the one side, the administration held a political clientelist view, where the press was expected to show loyalty to government, and adhere to implicit norms of obedience and self-censorship. On the other side, most of the faculty and students adopted the Western concept of journalism that was being taught in the classroom. The confrontation reproduced the national, complex disputes over the exercise of journalism, but even more critically, both sides failed to identify that different logics were at play. The language, the methods, and the objectives of these two concepts of the press were so distant that they prevented the parties from clearly understanding what each other was defending.