Legacy and Online Media and Political Distrust in Mexico

It’s the last day at IAMCR 2019, and I’m in a session on media effects that begins with a paper by Evelia Mani. Her focus is on the situation in Mexico, where there is acute mistrust in the political system. Such mistrust is now not uncommon world-wide, and may be explained by the poor performance of state and political institutional as well as by changing cultural attitudes – but the more immediate explanation is probably the former.

The mediatisation of political reality also has consequences for all this, of course. But the role of online and social media has not yet been fully theorised here, and the present paper used three waves of online questionaries in 2018 to assess Mexicans’ institutional confidence. It tested for levels of social media use, use of newspapers and television, levels of trust, and sociodemographic variables.

This found that distrust towards political institutions is now generalised in Mexico; this distrust is unevenly distributed across different institutions, however: the more concrete and executive institutions are more strongly distrusted. Attention to television and social networks also impacts positively on trust, with television more important here. This goes against techno-phobic conceptions of the impact of legacy and new media. Somewhat surprisingly, television emerges here as a particularly important positive factor, in fact.