Political and Social Actors in News Programs Are a Challenge for Mexican TV Channels Revista Latina
go to original November 19, 2015

Broadcast television is the main medium of communication in Mexico, but its news programs offer biased information regarding political issues, as they tend to privilege governmental sources of information to the detriment of non-official sources.

In order to prove this hypothesis, the contents of the two most-watched TV news programs in Mexico were analyzed to identify the political actors that appeared the most, the diversity of sources, and the frequency of appearance. The obtained data were subjected to the regular statistical analyses used in content analysis, while the Gini Index, which is a measure of statistical dispersion, is used to establish the degree of imbalance in the representation of the different political actors in news programs.

The findings indicate that the main sources of information included in news programs were members of Mexico’s Federal Government and, to a lesser extent, the legislative power and the state governments. Furthermore, of the different political parties operating in Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the current ruling party, is the most represented in TV news programs. Unsurprisingly, the main issues addressed in TV news programs were economy, security and politics, which are precisely also the main issues included in the agenda of the political actors.

The empirical evidence confirms the lack of modernization in Mexican journalism, which is characterized, among other aspects, by the absence of investigative journalism and its adherence to the agenda of the government, particularly the federal administration.

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