Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has stepped up attacks on the press during his six years in office, welcomed dozens of journalists who own influential information channels on YouTube on Friday.
“We do not want a subservient journalism,” said the leftist leader during his usual press conference, which served to inaugurate the meeting of communicators under the motto “to inform is to liberate.”
López Obrador, who will leave office on October 1 and has 4.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, was applauded by those in attendance.
“It’s an honor to be with Obrador,” shouted the journalists invited to the meeting, some of them originally from Argentina and Peru.
“There is no precedent for a congress of independent journalists and communicators like today’s,” said Manuel Pedrero, a 21-year-old Mexican political science student and director of Los Reporteros MX.
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Social media offered “the world the opportunity to tell its own version, to tell its own truth” in the face of “the mainstream media,” Pedrero added.
Technology, which was once the dominant media’s best ally, became their “downfall,” the young man stressed.
López Obrador’s initiative, however, has sparked skepticism and criticism on social media, where journalists and communicators invited by the government have their niche.
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“This is what La Mañanera was like this Friday: with the applauding YouTubers, cheering (long live) AMLO. What a pathetic scene,” wrote journalist Érika Velasco, head of information at Latinus, a website critical of the government, on her X account.
“The president did not start by talking about the drug blockades and shootings in Culiacán,” added the journalist, referring to the day of violence recorded on Thursday in the state of Sinaloa (northwest).
López Obrador often accuses Mexico’s traditional media and influential journalists of being part of the “power mafia.”
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Hit by a wave of violence from organised crime, Mexico is considered one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, with more than 150 journalists killed since 1994, according to the organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
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