When I first came to Mexico to work as a foreign correspondent in 2008, I knew nothing about the Mexican press or its history. At the US-based news agency where I worked, The Associated Press, we were told two things: first, we could not pick up information from the Mexican press without verifying it ourselves independently. The rigor and ethical standards for reporting were not the same. Second, we had to vet all Mexican freelancers working for the AP carefully because of the corruption in the press corps. We did not want journalists paid under the table by politicians, narcos, or other interests to compromise the integrity of the AP. At the time, we considered Reforma the most reliable day-to-day source, and we used the new twenty-four-hour television news service Milenio, akin to a Mexican CNN, as a tip sheet for breaking news around the country.

I learned over time that the general impression of the Mexican media was that it remained docile and full of corruption after many years of control under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country as a one-party system for seventy-one years. Although media companies in Mexico are private, they did the government’s bidding for decades and adhered to the party line in exchange for huge publicity contracts and pay under the table. PRI politicians over the years were known to buy journalists houses, cars, and vacations that they could never afford on their meager salaries—a phenomenon pioneered by President Miguel Alemán in the 1940s.

There were exceptions of course. Proceso magazine was founded in 1976 after director Julio Scherer was ousted from the traditional newspaper Excelsior, where he tried to create critical and independent journalism. While the newspaper’s editorial management was taken over by a coup of insiders, it was widely believed that then-President Luis Echeverria personally deposed Scherer for the negative coverage. The aggressive investigative magazine Zeta in Tijuana was established in 1980 in the same spirit. Reforma, founded in 1993, was relatively new when I arrived, an experiment in American-style independent journalism under a Mexican director who had been educated at the University of Texas at Austin.