Viva Baja? No si los medios Americanos lo pueden evitar!

Daniel Seet, a graduate student in Communications at Emerson College, brings us this insightful look into the mediated realities and agenda setting as set forth by American media surrounding the Baja. The piece compares two different takes on the state of affairs in the Baja, one from ABC, and one from NPR. Here's a snippet:

For years, news reports, especially those in the southern part of California, have been replete with stories of gang and drug related violence in towns and cities south of the border. Grisly stories of drive-by shootings, decapitations, execution-style murders constitute a regular diet that the Americans public is being by the media fed regarding daily happenings in Mexican border cities and towns such as Ensenada, Nuevo Laredo, Rosarito, Tijuana and others. The issue of the violence is well known, and the Mexicans accept this as their current lot as well. As TijuanaPress.com journalist Vicente Calderon said during a 27 March 2008 interview on KPBS’s These Days program, there is no doubt that violence exists in Tijuana [or other border cities]. However, what Calderon finds disconcerting is the poor reporting practices by some U.S. media that is exacerbating the generic level of prejudice that he feels many Americans already have towards their neighbors (These Days, 2008).

The impact of the media’s agenda-setting impact is undeniable. According to Jamieson and Waldman (2003, p. xii), the reporter’s views of the world are the lenses by which the world will understand the events being reported. The news coverage that results from those lenses thus becomes the frame or structure by which the public reads, hears, watches, and ultimately understands the world around them. Unfortunately for residents in Baja California, this is bad news because the dominant narrative currently being pushed about Mexico is the raging violence due to the ensuing battle between the drug cartels and the security forces of President Felipe Calderon, as well as infighting among the cartels for domination of the trafficking routes. The persuasive power of these narratives is further magnified when one brings in mediums such as television or radio, whose formatting takes audience from the dreariness of text and still pictures on a broadsheet to the compelling world of the audiovisual. If a picture says a thousand words, then one can only wonder about the mark left by motion videos and audio recordings.

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