Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels

Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at rushpost.com
Sun Jan 10 11:57:38 PST 2016


On Sun, 2016-01-10 at 11:39 -0800, coderman wrote:
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/censor-or-die-the-death-of-mexican-news-in-the-age-of-drug-cartels/2015/12/09/23acf3ae-8a26-11e5-9a07-453018f9a0ec_story.html
> 
> 
> Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels
> By Dana Priest December 11, 2015
> 
> CONTROLLING THE STORY: This is the fifth installment in an ongoing
> series examining the human cost of reporting the news around the
> world.
> 
> One journalist's experience on Mexico's deadliest beat
> 
> REYNOSA, Mexico — As deadline descended on El Mañana’s newsroom and
> reporters rushed to file their stories, someone in the employ of a
> local drug cartel called with a demand from his crime boss.
> 
> The caller was a journalist for another newspaper, known here as an
> enlace, or “link” to the cartel. The compromised journalist barked out
> the order: Publish an article saying the mayor in Matamoros had not
> paid the cartel $2 million a month in protection fees, as an El Mañana
> front-page story had alleged the day before.
> 
> “They want us to say he’s not guilty,” the editor who took the call
> told his colleagues during the episode in late October. Knowing
> glances passed between them as a visiting Washington Post reporter
> looked on.
> 
> They all knew that defiance carried a high price.
[...]

Sounds like the kind of thing that Tor and similar anonymity protections
were made for. Kind of sad that journalists, of all people, would have
to resort to publishing stories anonymously. As William Randolph Hearst
said, "Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising;
whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." Or, as more often
phrased, journalism is that which someone doesn't want published, and
everything else is public relations (PR).

Back in Hearst's day, though, killing journalists to silence them was
unthinkable, and people in general had a bit more scruples back then.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>




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