ABSTRACT
Politics and the media are today radically different from what Siebert and his colleagues studied sixty years ago thus, the sharp-cut apparently eternalised by Four Theories of the Press is less and less defendable. This chapter shows how the usual dichotomy between authoritarian rules that repress the media and democracies that enhance plurality greatly differs from what actually happened and, perhaps more interesting, from what is happening around the world. Using one of the most emblematic authoritarian rules in the world as an example, these pages show how neither Mexican authoritarianism not the process of democratisation fit perfectly in the assumptions set by normative theories of the media. That is, what the state-media relation was during the authoritarian rule and, after that, what the transition to democracy should be (as proposed by Siebert and his colleagues) greatly differs from empirical evidence. Furthermore, by contrasting the Mexican case with other transitional democracies, the chapter confirms crucial divergences among media systems during both the authoritarian rule and the process of democratisation. The chapter closes by putting forward some key reasons for searching alternative analytical perspectives to study the state-media relation beyond the authoritarian vs. the totalitarian state of mind.
