Changing myths: A comparative analysis of two print news media systems and their portrayal of Mexican and United States automobile workers, 1986--1993

This work compares U.S. and Mexican print news media systems in terms of their political economy, and it analyzes how eight different print news media outlets from the U.S. and Mexico (Business Week, Time, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Proceso, Expansion, Excelsior, and La Jornada) have portrayed Mexican and U.S. workers in four automobile assembly plants from 1986 to 1993: the GM plant in Van Nuys, California; the GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, California; the Ford-Mazda plant in Hermosillo, Sonora; and the Ford plant in Cuautitlan, the state of Mexico.; Due to the absence of comparative analyses between Mexican and U.S. media, this work is based on three interrelated original premises. First, both U.S. and Mexican print media systems have historically been subsidized by different social agents: corporate advertising in the U.S., and the state in Mexico. Second, despite the fact that the Mexican media have been dependent on the U.S. media system in terms of capital goods, newsprint supply, formats, and professional training, this dependency has not resulted in a press system heavily dependent on transnational advertising, giving the Mexican press a relative independence from transnational influence. Third, the ideological framework of news discourse was hypothesized to be the same in both media systems because of the general convergence of interests in the automobile sector between the Mexican state and transnational automakers.; In general terms, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of press discourse shows two different patterns of coverage across nationality lines: on the one hand, a uniform, mythical, and hegemonic coverage of labor in the case of U.S. print media outlets, systematically marginalizing or negatively portraying labor perspectives as well as minority labor voices in terms of both race/ethnicity and gender; on the other hand, diverse and contradictory, sometimes hegemonic and sometimes counterhegemonic, coverage of labor in the case of Mexico's print media outlets, with two contrasting patterns: (a) critical, counterhegemonic, and prolabor discourse in the case of the newspaper La Jornada and the news magazine Proceso; and (b) hegemonic, uncontextualized coverage by the newspaper Excelsior and the business magazine Expansion.