Overview

In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.

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9781478009825

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Reviews

This is a breakthrough book. With extensive documentation, Vanessa Freije narrates the uneven and incomplete dance among the public, journalists, and government that opened the Mexican media in the 1960s and transformed the nature of public debate and political culture. With delicate attention to forward movement and sinister recoil, she brilliantly situates her study in the proliferating field of inquiry into the public sphere. -- Mary Kay Vaughan, author of * Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation * Citizens of Scandal is a deeply researched account of the transformation of Mexican journalism during that country's economic transition from being a miracle of progress to its crisis (1960s-1980s). Vanessa Freije tracks the gradual diversification of Mexico's somewhat compromised and regulated print journalism, focusing most particularly on the press's part in managing scandal and rumor-agrarian corruption, forced sterilization, shady oil deals. This book introduces us to a vital agent in modern Mexican public life. -- Claudio Lomnitz, author of * The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon * [Citizens of Scandal] is an outstanding contribution to the literature on Mexican journalism and the communication processes involved in making scandals, and should be of considerable interest to scholars studying news in other one-party-dominant and 'hybrid' regimes, more generally. -- Daniel C. Hallin * Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly * In her insightful and analytically lucid Citizens of Scandal...Freije interweaves the stories of key journalists, famous chroniclers like Carlos Monsivais and Elena Poniatowska.... A selection of political cartoons and photographs enhances the impression of a press ever more willing to hold the powerful to account. -- Andrew Paxman * Hispanic American Historical Review * Of interest to political science and communications scholars and of course journalists, Freije's book is in harmonious conversation with other works that are fundamental to understanding the evolution of not only the Mexican media system, but Latin America's media systems in general. -- Grisel Salazar Rebolledo * NACLA Report on the Americas * [Citizens of Scandal] is a very accessible and engaging study, providing a better understanding of the mediated narratives and conflict triggered by pivotal historical events in modern Mexican history. As such, it builds on and adds to a growing literature on Mexican journalism. -- Stephen D. Morris * The Latin Americanist *

This is a breakthrough book. With extensive documentation, Vanessa Freije narrates the uneven and incomplete dance among the public, journalists, and government that opened the Mexican media from the 1960s and transformed the nature of public debate and political culture. With delicate attention to forward movement and sinister recoil, she brilliantly situates her study in the proliferating field of inquiry into the public sphere. -- Mary Kay Vaughan, author of * Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation *

Citizens of Scandal is a deeply researched account of the transformation of Mexican journalism during that country's economic transition from being a miracle of progress to its crisis (1960s-1980s). Vanessa Freije tracks the gradual diversification of Mexico's somewhat compromised and regulated print journalism, focusing most particularly on the press's part in managing scandal and rumor-agrarian corruption, forced sterilization, shady oil deals. This book introduces us to a vital agent in modern Mexican public life. -- Claudio Lomnitz, author of * The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon * This is a breakthrough book. With extensive documentation, Vanessa Freije narrates the uneven and incomplete dance among the public, journalists, and government that opened the Mexican media in the 1960s and transformed the nature of public debate and political culture. With delicate attention to forward movement and sinister recoil, she brilliantly situates her study in the proliferating field of inquiry into the public sphere. -- Mary Kay Vaughan, author of * Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation *

Author Information

Vanessa Freije is Assistant Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

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