This article addresses how to create democratic news media that foster participatory citizenship and government accountability. Using the case of Mexico, where journalism underwent a deep transformation in the 1980s and 1990s, the research finds that societal-level changes such as democratization and economic liberalization are only part of the explanation. What went on inside news organizations determined whether media took on a civic orientation enabling the creation of a public sphere, resisted societal-level change altogether, or reacted to only market-based cues. The result of these disparate transformations was the dissolution of an authoritarian institution into three competing models of news production with profoundly different sociopolitical implications. The study also discusses the application of sociological theory on organizations and institutions to the question of journalistic change in some depth.
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