By Juan Larrosa, March 31, 2025
Yesterday, March 30, marked the beginning of political campaigns for an unprecedented election in Mexico: judicial positions will be filled through direct voting for the first time in the country’s history. This type of election is rare, even at the international level. Few countries subject judicial appointments to popular vote, making this a highly uncertain process that deserves close attention.
In this piece, I want to focus on an issue of public and political communication: the role of the media and journalism during an electoral process.
In any democratic system—be it Republican, Representative, or Elitist—one of the core foundations is the existence of social mechanisms that enable the production and distribution of political knowledge among a community’s members. In an electoral context, this knowledge should revolve around the rules of the election, the candidates, and their proposals.
This knowledge is generated through various institutions, but in modern democracies, the media plays a fundamental role. It is the only institution with relative independence from public power that produces political knowledge while also possessing the infrastructure to distribute that information on a large scale—whether through print media, radio, television, or digital platforms.
In theory, their role is clear: to inform the public so that, at the time of voting, people can exercise their rights in an informed manner. Knowing that an election is taking place, understanding the rules, identifying the candidates, and, above all, discerning their positions and proposals is essential to casting a reasoned vote.
That’s the theory.
In practice, however, we face a structural epistemic-journalistic production problem. In other words, the media in Mexico, both as an institution and as an industry, cannot generate and disseminate the volume and quality of information needed for large-scale elections with numerous simultaneous candidacies.
This phenomenon was documented in a study I conducted with my colleague Sofía Palau as part of the media monitoring for the Electoral and Citizen Participation Institute of Jalisco during the 2021 state elections. We found that local media could not cover all candidates running for municipal and legislative offices. Some candidates were not mentioned even once throughout the entire campaign. This means that the public, at least through the media, was not even informed about who was on the ballot.
That constitutes a severe epistemic failure. And while current data is still pending, all signs suggest that the upcoming judicial election will suffer from the same problem.
Why? Mexico lacks the media and journalistic infrastructure necessary to cover an election of this magnitude. There are not enough journalists, newsrooms, resources, or working conditions to produce the information this election requires—both in terms of quantity and quality. Most voters will likely arrive at the polls without knowing who the candidates are, their backgrounds, or what they propose.
This order represents a serious democratic issue. It is urgent to rethink how elections are designed and strengthen the structural conditions of information production: more media outlets, more journalists, more resources, and better coverage.
This text was originally read on the NTR Radio newscast broadcast on March 31, 2025, hosted by journalist Sergio René de Dios Corona.