Propaganda in Mexican Government Press Conferences during COVID-19

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication 1 & Politics, Literature, and the Arts
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Communication 1

Abstract

During the pandemic, press conferences became one of the most essential information nodes of the Federal Government in Mexico. In the conferences, the government informed the population about the progress of the pandemic and organized the population to carry out collective actions such as quarantines or vaccination campaigns. At the same time, the federal government used them as a propaganda tool. Within this framework, this paper analyzes the press conferences as practices that constructed propagandistic discourses and narratives aimed at legitimizing and defending the federal government's actions.

The theoretical framework I propose is that of propaganda, a form of political communication defined as the exchange of information and symbols between two or more actors to influence the structure and maintenance of political power. This type of communication is characterized by its strategic focus on persuading or influencing people's thinking, opinions, emotions, and behaviors, seeking support for specific ideas, causes, ideologies, or actions (Zollmann, 2017, p. 7). In the case at hand, propaganda was used to seek support for the regime headed by President López Obrador.

This paper is an outgrowth of a larger project, an ethnographic observation of the press conferences that the Mexican government used to manage the pandemic. In particular, the data collection for this conference paper was done through live ethnography (Chadwick, 2017) and documentary research. First, a group of researchers observed the development of 60 government press conferences in real-time via the Internet. In the second, another group of researchers collected the videos and transcripts of these conferences. The data were then processed using the situational analysis approach (Clarke, 2005) and the social narratives framework (Shenhav, 2015). This methodological combo allowed the identification and analysis of propagandistic narratives.

Based on the above reasoning, the following research questions are posed:
• RQ1. What were the communicative practices through which the narrative and discursive strategies of the Mexican government's press conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic were constructed?
• RQ2. What narratives structured the Mexican government's propaganda strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• RQ3. How did these narratives, on a discursive level, legitimize the López Obrador government?

The conclusions indicate that the press conferences were structured in four communicative practices: 1) greeting and opening, 2) daily technical report, 3) thematic exposition, and 4) round of questions and answers with journalists; the journalistic narratives were constructed in practices 3 and 4 (RQ1). These practices were structured by three central narratives, which are developed in depth in the article: 1) the neoliberal past, which tells the story of previous governments that dismantled state institutions, leaving the public health system in ruins. 2) The poor people, which tells the story of a poor and malnourished population that has to face the pandemic in adverse circumstances. 3) Technological sovereignty. This narrative shows the government's efforts to produce its technologies, such as ventilators and vaccines, to face the pandemic (RQ2). These narratives legitimized the López Obrador government for several reasons. The first is that the narratives of the neoliberal past and the poor people served to justify the high mortality that the pandemic brought to Mexico: With a battered health system and a poor population, the SarsCov2 virus wreaked greater havoc than in countries with better health systems and a healthy population. On the other hand, the narrative of technological sovereignty placed a nationalist component in the governmental discourse. This nationalism aimed to differentiate the government of the time from those previously governed the country (RQ3).

This paper helps to advance the field of political communication in several ways. The first is that the literature review prepared for this paper shows that, although existing, research on press conferences is scarce. This paper provides a case study of this political communication practice. The second contribution is that it contributes to the knowledge of how the COVID-19 pandemic was communicatively managed in a country of the global south. Finally, thirdly, this work contributes to the studies on communication and propaganda from a critical approach and a qualitative methodology.

References
Chadwick, A. (2017). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford University Press.

Clarke, A. (2005). Situational Analysis. SAGE.

Shenhav, S. R. (2015). Analyzing Social Narratives. Routledge.

Wilke, J. (2008). Propaganda. In W. Donsbach (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication (pp. 3915–3919). American Cancer Society.

Zollmann, F. (2017). Bringing Propaganda Back into News Media Studies. Critical Sociology.

Author

• Juan Sebastian Larrosa-Fuentes, ITESO University