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Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Introduction. Not Authoritarian, But Not Yet Democratic. Advances, Setbacks, and Challenges in Mexican Media and Politics -- Mexican Media and Politics at Large. An Overview -- Understanding Mexican Changes and Continuities. Plural Journalisms and Transitional Legacies -- On This Volume -- Part I: Media Systems and Regulation. Explaining Continuities -- Part II: The Burden of Being a Journalist in Mexico. Risk, Security, and Censorship -- Part III. Post-authoritarian Media Performance: Actors and Representations in Dispute -- References -- Part I: Media Systems and Regulation: Explaining Continuities -- Chapter 2: Media Systems in Unconsolidated Democracies: The Case of Mexico -- Introduction: Media in Transitional Regimes -- Political Regimes, Media and Democracy -- Mexico: Media Openness in an Unfinished Transition -- Limits of Political Change: Electoral Alternation Without Democratic Consolidation -- Media Openness to Diversity: From Environmental Censorship to Convenient Arrangements -- Politics and Media During the Second Alternation: From Arrangements of Convenience to Confrontation -- Final Remarks -- References -- Chapter 3: Legal Protection of the Freedom of Expression in Mexico During the Alternation: Progress with No Results -- The Alternation as a Point of Inflection in the Media Opening -- Methodology -- Progress Without Results -- Three Moves to Advance the Laws on Social Communications in Mexico -- The Freedom of Speech in Constant Crisis -- Local Regulations on Social Communication -- Discussion. Great Advances with Few Results -- References -- Chapter 4: The Salinas Years, 1988-1994: Watershed in the Opening of Mexico's Print Media -- Salinas Offered Something New: Did He Deliver?.

Since Hallin and Mancini's (2004) seminal work, many scholars from around the world have proposed different models of media systems for countries and regions outside the Western world. Particular challenges have arisen when conceptualizing the systems in Latin America, where shifting liberal and polarized pluralist models have been proposed, and where media traits like clientelism and collusion remain in spite of political, economic and social changes. We contend that one obstacle to the characterization of the resilience of certain structures and practices in this region is the lack of a historical perspective to account for specific processes of media modernization. Drawing on the multiple modernization paradigm, as well as on post-colonial theories, system differentiation theories of the Global South, and theories of uneven regional development, we understand Latin American modernization processes as the appropriation, adaptation, or rejection of certain elements of Western institutions, ideals and values. In media systems, this might produce: (a) centralization of power, (b) a struggle between elites, (c) state-driven differentiation, and (d) regional or local subsystems. Our historical perspective aims to explain the prevalence of several media structures, and show how institutional legacies yield core media traits, in order to pave the way for further model inference.