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In recent decades, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous democracies for journalists. Their coverage of the war on drugs, abuses of power, and human rights violations has led to harassment, threats, and violence by powerful cartels and corrupt officials. This book provides a ground-level view of how Mexican journalists have navigated this perilous environment, offering insight into how they protect themselves while reporting on the most critical and sensitive subjects.
Based on in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, activists, and officials, Mexico’s Resilient Journalists examines the strategies that media workers have employed in pursuit of both personal safety and the public interest. Julieta Brambila argues that Mexican journalists have developed innovative forms of resilience, highlighting their power and agency amid violence, censorship, and intimidation. She considers how journalists have banded together to develop coping mechanisms, protect each other, and raise public awareness. These resilient newsmakers have adapted to adversity by redefining their professional values and practices, rethinking their surroundings, and reassessing their role. Brambila also evaluates how various media organizations have learned from incidents of violence and changed their policies to better protect their reporters. Shedding new light on defense of the freedom of the press in Mexico, this book offers crucial lessons for other countries seeing a rise in threats to independent journalism.
— Roderic Ai Camp, coauthor of Politics in Mexico: The Path of a New Democracy
Very few studies of the Mexican press or violence against journalists in general have been able to move beyond description to offer general frameworks for understanding what types of journalists are vulnerable to attack and why. Brambila does that and, in this way, offers lessons for all of journalism studies while paying homage to the particular human rights crisis that has racked the journalists in her country for nearly two decades.
— Sallie Hughes, author of Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico
Nowhere in recent years have journalists been more at risk than Mexico, and no one has explained that situation better than Julieta Brambila. Based on years of intensive research and interviews with working journalists, Mexico's Resilient Journalists is a compelling account of the perils Mexican newsmakers encounter and their creative strategies for dealing with them. Anyone who values the central role of news media in public life will admire this book.
— John Nerone, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This book is critical for understanding how the mirage-like nature of shaky democracies allows violence to pervade journalism. Brambila’s descriptions and analyses of the dangers facing Mexican journalists offer a blueprint for their survival that empowers them by focusing on teamwork and resilience. An important read for those concerned with the future of journalism in democracies—unstable or otherwise.
— Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
While the specific context may be Mexican, the patterns of institutional failure, journalist resilience, and the emergence of grassroots protection networks that Brambila documents echo the feminist understanding that safety emerges not from state protection but from collective organizing and mutual care.
An insightful addition to a growing body of recent literature on the tenuous status of journalists, particularly in an insecure modern democracy....would be useful in graduate courses related to conflict journalism of both the past and the present.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Outrage Brought Us Together”
Part I. What’s Going on Here?
1. Why Has It Become So Easy to Kill Journalists?
2. The Wave of Violence Against the Press
3. Violent Censors
Part II. How Do Journalists Persevere?
4. Strategies for Autonomous Safety
5. Strategies of Resistance
Conclusion
Appendix I. Glossary of Translated Terms
Appendix II. Study Design
Appendix III. List of Interviews
Appendix IV. Time Line
Notes
Bibliography
Index