Tele-Visiones (Tele-Visions): The Making of Mexican Television News, 1950-1970

Abstract

Between 1950 and 1970 television emerged as one of the most important forms of mass communication in Mexico. An analysis of television news scripts and film clips located at the Televisa (the nation’s largest television network) Archives in Mexico City exposed tensions and traditions in television news. The tensions reveal conflicts between: the government and media producers; modernity and the desire to create traditions and maintain those already invented; elite controllers of the media and popular viewers; a male dominated business and female news producers and viewers; an elite (mostly white) group of media moguls and a poor mestizo and indigenous viewers; and the United States and Mexico in the midst of the Cold War. In contrast to the trend in scholarship on Mexican television, this dissertation demonstrates that media executives such as Emilio Azcárrraga Milmo and high ranking government officials within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) maintained close connections, but the two groups did not always walk in lock-step. Analysis of newscast scripts and film clips located at Televisa’s (Mexico’s largest network) Archive reveal a more complex picture, which shows there were several and sometimes competing visions for the country's future. Examining the first twenty years of television news in Mexico City, the author focuses on production, content, and interpretations of the news. The dissertation finds evidence to prove that news producers and writers formed tele-traditions that influenced news production, content, and interpretation well into the 1980s. Unprecedented access to Televisa Archives allowed the author to ask and answer questions, that to date scholars have not treated, such as, what makes Mexican television news Mexican? The dissertation is grounded in a theoretical framework called hybridity of framing, which combines the concepts of cultural hybridity and news framing. The dissertation concludes that although news producers and writers attempted to frame events in certain ways, viewers often interpreted the news differently.