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On March 6, the Mexican Health Ministry began to broadcast daily press briefings on covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Initially, the audience for the briefings was mostly journalists, but soon the broader populace began to tune in each night at 7pm. Mexicans joke that the briefings have become the new hit telenovela, with Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the ministryâs silver-haired undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, an unlikely heartthrob. Each briefing begins with a PowerPoint presentation of the dayâs confirmed deaths and new cases, active and recovered, in Mexico and worldwide. During the early weeks of the pandemic, Mexican social media was frequently flooded with graphs-and-stats-heavy memes that lauded Lopez-Gatellâs presentations.
Such briefings are at the center of the Mexican governmentâs covid-19 media strategy. They follow a similar tack to the one President AndrĂ©s Manuel LĂłpez Obrador has taken since assuming office in late 2018: incessant information as a stand-in for transparency. But amid the steady stream of information, accurate data remains elusive. Multiple investigations have shown that official counts of confirmed cases and deaths donât capture the magnitude of the virusâs spread in Mexico. Mexico has a record-low testing rateâat 2.54 tests per confirmed case, the lowest among the thirty-seven countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Lopez-Gatell has repeatedly acknowledged that the official numbers are likely lower than the actual figures. In a situation already rife with misinformation, including concerns that the government is either neglecting or manufacturing the crisis, such imprecision only fosters more uncertainty. As the country begins reopening, the lack of data transparency poses an information crisis for journalists as well as the general public. And despite journalistsâ urgings, officials refuse to take a new tack.
On May 8, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and El PaĂs published articles suggesting that the governmentâs official death toll numbered far fewer than the actual count. In response to those stories, hundreds of pro-AMLO Twitter accounts excoriated the journalists behind them. Health authorities didnât deny the allegations; rather, in a wordy six-minute response video heavy on epidemiological jargon, Lopez-Gatell discussed the complexities of tracking the numbers.
Shortly thereafter, the think tank Mexicanos Contra la CorrupciĂłn y Impunidad (Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity) released an investigation of death certificates in Mexico City, which showed that deaths attributed to covid added up to three times the cases included in the official count. An investigation by Quinto Elemento Lab in Mexico City showed that 911 calls reporting covid deaths also numbered triple the official count of non-hospital covid deaths. Journalists have reported uncounted deaths and test backlogs across the country.
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Pablo PĂ©rez, a journalist with Verificovid, a project of the fact-checking initiative Verificado dedicated to fact-checking media claims and social media rumors, points out that federal statistics also differ from those offered at the state level. âMainstream outlets use the number that works for their editorial line,â he says. âSometimes they get it from the states, sometimes nationally; thereâs a lot of confusion.â Official explanations refer to the criteria for data-gathering on covid deaths: the official deaths count includes only confirmed covid cases, not the many suspected cases that arenât tested after people die. Lopez-Gatell has affirmed that the data underestimates the actual numbers, but he insists it accurately captures the trends.
Andrea CĂĄrdenas, one of the reporters behind the Quinto Elemento Lab investigation, believes the government is dramatically undervaluing the importance of maintaining official numbers. âWe all have the right to know the real number of covid deaths, confirmed, those who didnât get a test, either because they didnât go to the hospital or because they were rejected by hospitals,â she says. âBeyond a statistic, the official number of deaths, all those deaths deserve to be counted because those deaths correspond to a person that had dreams, a story, a life, a community. Itâs the life of a personâhow can that not matter?â
Those numbers also have broader implications for public health. They can explain, CĂĄrdenas says, what populations are turned away from hospitals, as well as who might avoid hospitals altogether, and who fears the widespread stigma around being diagnosed with covidâall issues relevant for journalists, government institutions, and the public in general.
âIf the strategy is to control the narrative, itâs going really badly,â says PĂ©rez of available public health information to date. âThere are contradicting discourses. Neither the media nor the government are dictating the narrative. Social media is imposing the discourse.â Many Mexicans continue to believe the virus doesnât exist. The country has begun reopening on a stoplight system; seventeen states are in the orange, or high-risk, phase. But despite admonitions from Lopez-Gatell that the pandemic continues, movement has dramatically increased across the country.
Concern over the quality of public health data stems partially from a historic generalized mistrust of the Mexican state. As of 2019, 87 percent of Mexicans saw the government as deeply corrupt. In a country where prominent media outlets are infamous for receiving money in exchange for parroting official lines, distrust of the media and the state go hand in hand.
Discontent with the governmentâs handling of the pandemic also has partisan roots. Opponents of President LĂłpez Obrador, whose antiestablishment rhetoric has won him vehement opposition, take the governmentâs handling of the pandemic as a referendum on the ruling party. Conversely, the presidentâs supporters have led social media rampages against journalists who have questioned the governmentâs data. After the May 8 investigations came out, Twitter was flooded with a bot campaign under the hashtag #PrensaProstituida, or Prostituted Press, against the reporters behind the stories.
Of course, thereâs no guarantee that accurate data would make the general public more cautious. âIf they say a million, two million [cases], people think that maybe that should scare the public,â PĂ©rez, of Verificovid, points out. âIn the case of the US, where they have the most cases, people want to go out anyway.âÂ
The lack of data transparency also poses a challenge for journalists in stretched newsrooms. For journalists without backgrounds in statistics or epidemiology, itâs difficult to critique what one canât see.Â
âThe government is communicating a complicated set of info to reporters who may or may not be prepared or have the tools to decipher that info,â says Jan Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists. âItâs very difficult for beat reporters to communicate whatâs going on and make sense of it under all this stress and pressure and polarization.â
âWe canât see public contracts, we canât see everything thatâs being spent, so we have to trust the information that they give us.â
In May, Sarahi Uribe, a reporter for El Sol de MĂ©xico, cited a comment by a former health secretary and then asked Lopez-Gatell whether he was âlying to Mexicoâ about coronavirus numbers. When the undersecretary asked for clarification, Uribe faltered: âHe says thereâs⊠that your data doesnât add up⊠let me see.â Lopez-Gatell laughed in response and encouraged the young reporter to investigate and ask the question again later. On social media, users pointed to Uribeâs slip-up as an example of uninformed, ideologically motivated anti-government journalism.
But Uribeâs question indicates the challenge many journalists find themselves facing. Part of the reporterâs job is to interrogate the stateâs narrative. When the basis of the narrative is data that only the government has, itâs difficult to find a way in.Â
In addition to the lack of transparency around cases and deaths, the pandemic has made other public information less accessible.
âThe information is concentrated in the federal and local health ministries, so itâs hard to compare it with other sources,â says CĂĄrdenas of Quinto Elemento Lab. âMany offices have prolonged the reopening of their activities, and they donât answer our information requests. We canât see public contracts, we canât see everything thatâs being spent, so we have to trust the information that they give us.âÂ
LĂłpez Obrador has continued to insist that journalism critical of the administration is ideologically motivated. In late April, the president said in a press conference that Mexico lacked a âprofessional, independentâ news media.Â
âItâs a gross lack of recognition of hundreds of highly professional and independently minded reporters,â Hootsen says. Daily, the countryâs reporters ârisk their lives, health, reputation, and livelihood even to get the most simple stories out that might be critical.â Mexico continues to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Since the covid-19 lockdown began, two Mexican journalistsâJorge Miguel Armenta Ramos and Maria Elena Ferralâhave been murdered. Thirteen have died of covid-19.
Lopez-Gatell continues to show his own frustration with media coverage of the covid crisis. In a late-June press briefing, the subsecretary presented a video he called âThe Long Epidemic.â The nine-minute montage showed clips of Lopez-Gatell repeating ad nauseam, from March to June, âWe have to be prepared for a long epidemic.â
âLetâs not assume that the journalists or editors or heads or owners of these outlets, who probably finally define the agendas of those outlets, have bad intentions,â Lopez-Gatell concluded. âMaybe they donât watch the daily press briefing.â
Madeleine Wattenbarger is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City, where she primarily covers human rights, politics and social movements. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Vice and the Baffler.