Mexico is considered the most dangerous country in the world to practice journalism, according to the National Human Rights Commission and the Reporters Without Borders, since more than 80 journalists have been killed for publishing narco-related news.
Offices of Televisa and of local newspapers have been bombed.The cartels have also threatened to kill news reporters in the U.S. who have done coverage on the drug violence.
Some media networks simply stopped reporting on drug crimes, while others have been infiltrated and corrupted by drug cartels.
In 2011, Notiver journalist Miguel Angel Lopez Velasco and his wife and son were murdered in their home.
About 74 percent of the journalists killed since 1992 in Mexico have been reporters for print newspapers, followed in number by Internet media and radio at about 11 percent each. Television journalism only includes 4 percent of the deaths.
These numbers seem a bit disproportionate — in 2006, there were 462 newspapers registered with the Secretariat of the Interior. The newspaper with the largest circulation of any in Mexico has a circulation of a mere 385,000, about the size of the Houston Chronicle, the tenth largest in the United States.
Online publications still do not have the influence print has, with only 22.5 percent of households having Internet access.[year needed] But 82.5 percent of households own a radio and 94.7 percent have a television set.
There is no clear explanation of why a medium that reaches a much smaller portion of the population is statistically much more dangerous, but typically, print journalists are in the field more often than broadcast.[citation needed]
Since harassment neutralized many of the traditional media outlets, anonymous blogs like Blog del Narco took on the role of reporting on events related to the drug war. The drug cartels responded by murdering bloggers & social media users. Twitter users have been tortured and killed for posting and denouncing information of the drug cartels activities. In September 2011, user NenaDLaredo of the website Nuevo Laredo Envivo was murdered allegedly by the Zetas.
In May 2012 it was reported that three photojournalists were found dismembered in the eastern state of Veracruz, days after a crime reporter for a national magazine was also killed in her house there.
According to the New York Times, human rights groups condemned the deaths as "another worrying sign of the vulnerability of journalists reporting on the wave of drug and organized crime violence that has rocked Mexico in the past six years and left more than 50,000 people dead."
