Mexican Television and Alemán

As president, Alemán shunned any public, obvious indication of his intention to invest personally in the new medium. Instead, he searched for a means to delay the commercial development of television, until he could devise a plan to insinuate himself into the television business. Allegedly at the suggestion of the director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, the composer Carlos Chávez, in 1947 Alemán commissioned a two-man team to explore options for the development of television in Mexico. The team consisted of the writer Salvador Novo and the brilliant engineer, Guillermo González Camarena, who was the technical chief of the Azcarraga radio empire (he patented the first color television camera). Submitted in 1948, the resultant report essentially proposed two alternatives, one patterned on the commercial, privately owned model of the United States, and the other a government-run, noncommercial model similar to that of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in Great Britain.

The Mexican government after the Revolution of 1910 generally had maintained a benign stance toward the private media, relying on censorship when necessary to keep radio, for instance, in line with governmental policies. Even during the populist presidency of Lizaro Cirdenas, the federal government had refused to take a heavy-handed posture toward a radio industry that was basically unsympathetic to the administration. In legal terms, the state clearly possessed the authority to regulate the industry and to produce programming, as legislation before and since the advent of television repeatedly sustained the potent role of the federal government in mass communications. In fact, early on government radio stations broadcast programming of various types, but they abstained from direct, genuine competition with private ownership; government-run radio stations were notably dull and predictably unpopular. Thus, in practice no precedent existed for the BBC model in Mexico. The federal government under Alemán moved to intervene in the film industry in 1952, but it did so to halt the precipitous decline of Mexican cinematic production, to eliminate the monopolistic control over film distribution by the American expatriate, William Jenkins, and to safeguard the monetary interests of a small circle of wellconnected movie impresarios. Yet, the government avoided the actual making of movies, again relying on censorship to curb critical political expression on the part of filmmakers.

Alemán was also manifestly pro-business. He had served as the secretario de gobernación (secretary of the interior) in the Avila Camacho administration, where he consistently used his political influence to support private enterprise and to distance himself from the populism of the previous president, Lázaro Cárdenas. Furthermore, the Alemán administration was infamously corrupt, marked by the frequent abuse of presidential privilege to promote the private interests of Alemán and his cabal of friends and business associates. In short, the history of media-state relations in Mexico, or Alemán's political career, offered little evidence to suggest that he would seriously consider a policy of government control over television. Rather, it appears that Novo and Gonzilez Camarena were used by Alemán in a scheme for him to become financially involved in the nascent television industry.