The impact of the ‘war on drugs’ on the Mexican media image

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to access the image of Mexico produced by the German press over fifteen years, starting at the dawn of the new millennium, when the PRI's dominance came to an end. We considered the two leading German newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, apart from the alternative tageszeitung and the weekly Der Spiegel. The study is founded on 2569 articles, from which 458 were included in the quantitative content analysis using a stratified sample. Besides, qualitative interviews with German correspondents complemented the findings. At first glance, the foreign reporting about Mexico seems balanced. Unlike other foreign reporting analyses, its coverage does not concentrate solely on political issues (33%). A considerable amount of economic (15.5%) and cultural (23%) topics leads to a balanced image (60%), even though the reporting was tailored to a German domestic audience. Finally, observing the reporting development, one notices an increase of 33 pp of the coverage on ‘crime & delinquency' – a negative impact of Calderon’s war on drugs. At the same time, political coverage decreased by 21.5pp. The paper analyses the Mexican image in Germany for the first time and contributes to the update of a vast literature on foreign reporting.