Just in time for Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico, the new president of that country, Enrique Peña Nieto, was splashed on the cover of Time magazine’s international editions with the headline “Saving Mexico.”
“Five years ago, drug violence was exploding, the Mexican economy was reeling,” Time‘s Michael Crowley writes–but these days “alarms are being replaced with applause.” Peña Nieto has a passed a package of what Time–and most other US media–call economic reforms, most notably opening the national oil business Pemex to foreign corporations. Keeping the oil company publicly owned, Time explains, was a bad move, since “national pride meant that Mexico missed out on the global energy boom.”
As Shannon Young wrote in an illuminating piece for the Texas Observer (2/10/14), this is a pretty typical take: “The American media has almost universally portrayed the restructuring of Pemex as a bold measure that will benefit both Mexico and private investors while breathing new life into an ailing monopoly.” (Young noted that when Time last year named Peña Nieto as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, the president’s effusive profile was written by Bill Richardson, identified as “a former governor of New Mexico”–and not, more relevantly, as an executive at a PR firm currently working for the Office of the President of the Republic of Mexico.)
To Time, all this good news about Mexico means the “smart money has begun to bet on peso power,” and the piece closed by praising these speedy reforms : “Is it possible that America’s leaders could learn a thing or two from its resurgent southern neighbor?”
It’s not that Time excluded critics from its picture of Mexico. “Skeptics scoff at this sunny narrative,” Crowley admitted.
They sure did. Critics pounced on Time‘s puff piece; interestingly, one of the more helpful pieces came from USA Today (2/19/14), under the headline “Everyone Giddy Over Mexico–Except Mexicans.” It turns out that while Time thinks Peña Nieto is saving Mexico, Mexicans give him very low marks; he has a 32 percent approval rating. And those “reforms” being touted by Time leave many Mexicans wondering if they’ll see any benefit; foreign oil companies might profit from oil drilling, but what will that do for Mexican citizens? And actual growth in 2013 was 1.3 percent–well short of the sunny 3.5 percent growth that was forecast.
One critic, Bill Conroy of NarcoNews (2/17/14), noted that a few weeks earlier Time had published a 14-page advertising spread touting Mexico’s turnaround, sponsored by the government and corporate interests. Conroy argues that Time‘s journalism and this advertorial bore some striking resemblances. The magazine disagreed, of course; but it’s worth recalling that Time, Inc. has already declared that part of the company’s new business strategy will include blurring the line between editorial and advertising (FAIR Blog, 1/2/14). As the New York Times reported (12/30/13), “The newsroom staffs at Time Inc.’s magazines will report to the business executives.”
That’s not to say this explains what happened at Time–but it is exactly the sort of thing that can happen when journalists answer to people whose job is selling ads.
How Nieto and his neoliberal allies can claim that Mexico was missing out on the oil boom is a serious piece of disingenuous u-no-wat. The government had been cashing in on that very oil boom for decades — how did they “miss out?”
The only ones who missed out on anything appears to be Time’s editors.
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That doesn’t make any sense, on its face. But Time does not strike me as being written for people who think about what they read, or they should have lost most of their readership by now, the readers having given up on the magazine for just such illogic trying to pass as plausible reasoning.
As with Bill O’Reilly and Tom Friedman, we keep hearing about them – Why? Because anyone listens to them any longer? Why?
Turn it all off. It’s all long since been in the Dustbin of History and we should get past Dumpster Diving as a mainstream pursuit. The MSM targets “mainstream America”, meaning that 1/7 of the population with an IQ too small to be used for self-defense; and people content to let the TV and print media drone on about “something” for the sake of feeling like they have human companionship. The fact is that nobody is really paying attention to anything they hear. If they replayed The War of the Worlds like Orson Welles’s scare story so many years ago? Nobody would even notice that Martians were attacking. Martians invading New Jersey? Boring. Can we watch The Simpsons now?
Josef Goebbels would love our country now: “We don’t even have to think what we say! We can say Anything At All, and the people will believe it!” He must be rolling in his grave for having been born too soon.
Markup to the rescue – not. The quote I cited above, that got eaten by the angle brackets, was
Keeping the oil company publicly owned, Time explains, was a bad move, since “national pride meant that Mexico missed out on the global energy boom.”
And the point I made, if I was being too subtle, is that if there was an oil boom, the owners of the oil would benefit, be that a private corporation or the nation state of Mexico. To assert that Mexico’s owning the oil made them “miss out” could only be explained if people needing oil would not buy that oil from a nationalized vendor; but the people buying oil care nothing about that, they care about price only, and Time’s statement is, as I said, on its face absurd. So I agree with “NoDifference” about that; and with @digueno in wondering why anyone thinks anyone reads (*) anything.
(*) in order to gain understanding.
The media are on autopilot broadcasting pabulum in order to pretend to extraterrestrial visitors that ours is a literate planet. They hope the Martians will assume that meaning is being exchanged and consumed. It’s not. It appears that the writer of the movie “Idiocracy” was actually an unrecognized prophet for our age.
There is supposed to be a law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for American companies to go into another nation and use bribery. Except—- look at the history of Walmart in Mexico, and wonder how all that bribery could go on and Walmart is still operating in its usual way with no repercussions. Wow, I wonder what oil deals have broken this same law? Will we ever know?
you got to be kidding me? Pena Nieto, shouldn’t be there with that title SAVING MEXICO, excuse me? But Felipe Calderon did all this work for Mexico, His name should be there. Calderon started this fight against the drug cartels. I don’t care about the progress in Mexico now, because everything is a big FAT lie.
but anyways god bless Pena Nieto and Mexico