We’ve all heard the old proverb, “nature abhors a vacuum,” or its variation “power, like nature abhors a vacuum.” With the ascendancy of “conservative media” — i.e. Fox News, Drudge Report and the Big sites — to name just a few – we have also learned that news and information abhors a vacuum.
Fox News hasn’t grown to dominate cable network news and opinion because people were completely satisfied with the status-quo network news media — because let me tell you, we weren’t. And despite what myopic critics claim, Fox News hasn’t become a cable news powerhouse simply because we suddenly decided that we prefer to watch attractive, intelligent, leggy blonde lawyers deliver the news (although it helps). No, there was an obvious vacuum in the news industry.
Although advances in technology and the full flowering of the information age coincided with the growth of alternative and conservative media, we all sensed that something was very wrong with television news long before Fox burst on the scene. Rush Limbaugh became new-media pioneer and a “mega-platinum-dittos” success on seemingly moribund AM radio by realizing that America was hungry for something different and better, something not leftist.
Mainstream network news, by its own open and blatant bias, had created a news, information and opinion vacuum. When an entire industry is controlled by doctrinaire liberals with a bad case of herd mentality as fully and openly as the “Mainstream Media” has become, eventually free people living in free markets will seek out alternatives. If only it were that simple for our neighbors south of the border.
In Mexico the problem is different and tragic; it is violence and death being visited upon men and women working in Mexico’s news media that is choking off information and news, not differing political philosophy. Increasing violence against reporters — reportedly by the drug cartels — has recently caused the Mexican media to take a step back from its reporting of the Mexican drug war, which has been raging since 2006. This void culminated in last week’s plea for a truce by the newspaper El Diario in the murder capital of Mexico, and one of the most dangerous places in the world — Juarez, Mexico.
This is just the latest example of the increasing influence over all aspects of life in Mexico by the cartels. It seems this reign of violence and death has dropped a dark curtain of self-censorship down over Mexican news reporting of the cartel wars. The media is intimidated, and I can’t blame them, the alternatives are few. Be silenced, quit the media or die.
It is against this backdrop that the British news site Guardian.co.uk recently published an interesting article describing how Twitter and blogs are becoming, to a growing extent, the replacements for traditional, but now increasingly dangerous job of news reporting in Mexico. In an excellent piece by Jo Tuckman, “Twitter feeds and blogs tell hidden story of Mexico’s drug wars,” Tuckman tells the tale of how the Mexican media has been increasingly muzzled by the drug cartels and how threats of violence — brought home by dead and missing colleagues — has effectively quieted the media in an obvious bid to lessen the bad publicity generated by in depth reporting of the mayhem in Mexico. As a result, alternative media like Twitter and blogs have, to some extent as Tuckman says, come ” to occupy the information vacuum they leave behind.”
In her story, Tuckman offers up some disturbing tweets as examples:
“Shots fired by the river, unknown number of dead,” read one recent tweet on a busy feed from the northern border city of Reynosa. “Organized crime blockade on San Fernando road lifted,” said another. “Just saw police officers telling a group of narcos about the positions of navy checkpoints,” ran a third.
The third tweet offers a chilling and telling example of why traditional reporting of the violence and corruption so pervasive in Mexico is either underreported or more often why it goes completely unreported. The tweet tells us that (presumably local) police officers are cooperating with the cartels in day-to-day operations, in this case as lookouts.
Observers of Mexico and long time neighbors like me have long known that corrupted police officers have decided that taking bribes and cooperating with the cartels beats any illusion of integrity or the potential penalty for not cooperating — death.
The Guardian piece also mentions El Blog de Narco dedicated to reporting some of what has gone missing in the daily papers. While some of the milder items are typical of a Mexican newspaper, let me caution you, what is printed in Mexico is often much more graphic than what is printed in the United States (and, as many of you know, what is printed in foreign newspapers is generally racier or more violent than we see in American mass circulation publications).
Photos of severed heads and dead bodies are common place in many Mexican newspapers and El Blog de Narco has plenty of photos of dead bodies and severed heads. Tuckman writes:
Much of the material comes from the cartels themselves, but in an email interview with the Guardian, the anonymous administrator insisted he has no direct relationship with them.
“We just publish the information,” he wrote, adding that the blog sometimes receives 4m visits a week.
“Blog del Narco grew because the media and the government are trying to pretend that nothing is happening in Mexico.”
It is obvious to many that something very dangerous is happening in Mexico and it does not portend well for the United States no matter how much tax money we choose to throw at the problem, which so far runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.