Mexico's biggest network alleged to sell editorial line

Mexico’s biggest television network, Televisa, is alleged to have sold its editorial line to prominent politicians, leaked documents obtained by the Guardian appear to indicate. 

Televisa was found to make favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to defame a popular leftwing leader. Many people have been accusing Televisa network of manipulating its coverage to favour the leading candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto.

Dozens of computer documents, which seems to have been created for several years, emerge weeks before the presidential elections on 1 July. These files include payment arrangements of the former president office on media promotion; an outline of fees used for raising Peña Nieto’s national profile.

Televisa is the largest media empire in the Spanish-speaking world, which controls almost two-thirds of Mexico’s overall free television programmes. As a result, Televisa exerts a “powerful influence over national politics,” according to the Guardian. 

“This is especially significant in a country where newspapers, the Internet, and cable TV have a limited reach, particularly among the poor,” according to World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. 

Televisa has reportedly issued a statement denying the sale of its editorial line for political interests, and asking Guardian’s Editor and Readers’ Editor to issue a public apology. The statement also accused the Guardian of lacking in professionalism and journalistic rigour, according to Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network in the U.S.

“The lack of journalistic rigour with which the article was written is exhibited in the fact that the reporter uses the word apparently eight times, but it does not figure in the title,” according to Guatemalan news site Prensalibre.com.

Image: Forbes