Having taken on elements of the News Corp mass media empire run by Rupert Murdoch, involving the UK newspaper division of News International, linked to the phone hacking scandal, the Guardian is at the centre of a fresh furore. This time the target is the Televisa group in Mexico, which has about 70 percent of the television audience in the country and is the largest mass media company in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world.
The controversy surrounds the accusation of alleged collusion between Televisa and Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the forthcoming July elections, who is also the current frontrunner according to opinion polls. Specifically, the allegations have derived from the freelance correspondent, Jo Tuckman, in an article on 7 July, claming ‘dirty tricks’ in the race for the presidency. Documents apparently reveal the Televisa network to have both favoured Peña Nieto ahead of the presidential elections on 1 July and smeared the left-leaning candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), currently second in the polls, who also narrowly lost the 2006 election.
