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Media Opening and Democratization
tain reasonable margins.3 An artificially restricted supply of advertising revenues accentuates the influence of existing large advertisers, be they state-owned firms (such as Pemex, the country’s oil-and-gas monopoly) or latter-day oligarchs. These latter-day oligarchs represent another salient obstacle to media diversity. In Mexico, large swaths of the economy remain dominated by private cartels linked directly or indirectly to the state and the PRI. Mexican economist Rogelio Ramírez de la O aptly characterized this model as “concessionary capitalism,” in which profits are privatized to owners of large corporations while losses are socialized through government subsidies and bailouts.4 Such a concentration of financial and industrial enterprises in the hands of like-thinking owners encourages indirect control over the media through control of advertising. The fact that many of Mexico’s latter-day oligarchs are prominent beneficiaries of the Salinas administration’s privatization program only exacerbates the potential threat they pose to media independence and pluralism. Even more problematic for media openness in Mexico is the fact that some of these same businessmen are also media owners. The problem is especially pronounced in broadcast television, where competition is effectively restricted to two major networks. Such ownership patterns are especially problematic for media openness because the firms in question are not modern corporations but family-owned enterprises, whose editorial decisions may be particularly vulnerable to their owners’ personal predilections. Although commercial competition and professional norms may restrain capricious intervention by owners in editorial decisions, it cannot remove the danger that media owners will manipulate coverage to serve personal ends. Related to ownership patterns is Mexico’s system for allocating and withdrawing broadcast concessions. This system is directly controlled by the executive branch, rather than by an independent regulatory agency, and remains vulnerable to political manipulation. Changes in the current system to clarify the grounds for withdrawal of a concession, and to separate the withdrawal of concessions from their issuance, would make it more difficult for authorities to influence private broadcasters. So would reforms that facilitated market entry by new firms, thus increasing competition. Finally, vigorous enforcement of existing anti-monopoly regulations would help guarantee market competition in heavily concentrated industries. Enforcement would not only prevent firms from dominating markets at any one point in time; it would also prevent them