SOBERANÍA: HELPING YOU TAKE OUT THE MEDIA TRASH

Is your mailbox — and I mean all of them, not just the one hanging outside your house — too damn full? I scramble to keep up, and I’m not always sure what to read or listen to or what to toss or tune out. As I think back, not only have I been scammed by phone or social media marketers, I’ve also bitten the bait thrown out by the mainstream news. It’s not easy to recognize stories that leave out key facts, that use words that slip attitudes into your subconscious, or just plain lie.

News stories about another country, such as Mexico, are especially hard to decipher. It’s easy for US readers to thoughtlessly accept the description of President López Obrador as a “swaggering populist,” as in a recent New Yorker article, or as a “narco-president,” as the US media insinuated in 2024.

These tropes fit neatly into the racist stereotypes already familiar to us from years of “news,” painting all Latin American leaders as tyrannical and corrupt. Journalists regurgitate these same stories over and over until they seem like facts. From conservative Mexican to US sources, the stories freely cross the border. Even trusted TV sources like Democracy Now and the journal NACLA often repeat these analyses. They both got AMLO wrong.

So, how do we sort our mail? Never fear, Kurt Hackbarth and José Luis Granados Ceja are at your service. By just listening to their podcast Soberanía for an hour a week, you’ll get the real deal from the point of view of Mexico’s poor and working class. The perspective of Soberanía isn’t filtered through the corporate and national interests of the US media or the elite posturing of those longing to return to the good old days when upper class interests prevailed.

You may not like to clean, but listening to Soberanía is an easy and fun way of clearing away the trash!

Mexico City-based freelance writer and photojournalist José Luis Granados Ceja is a staff writer with Venezuelanalysis and co-hosts the podcast Soberanía and current affairs program Sin Muros. Follow him on X @granadosceja.

Kurt Hackbarth, a US-born Mexican citizen who has lived in Mexico for decades, writes for Jacobin magazine and co-hosts the podcast Soberanía and current affairs program Sin Muros. He co-founded the publishing house Matanga! Follow him on X @kurthackbarth.

You are a dynamic media duo — you’ve got great on-air chemistry! José Luis, you lived in Mexico City, and Kurt, you lived far away in Oaxaca. How did you meet and decide to work together on your podcast “Soberanía,” which means “Sovereignty?”

Kurt Hackbarth: Since AMLO’s election in 2018, several progressive journalists in Mexico and the US were frustrated by the appallingly bad English language coverage of his presidency. Information was, at best, simply missing. At worst, there was misinformation and outright lies, slamming AMLO and buttressing the right-wing politics of the old PRI and PAN parties.

So, in 2020, pulled together by the Mexico Solidarity Project, we formed a “Rapid Response/Media Outreach” group to plan how to counter the fake news and tear off the masks of the so-called journalists writing the trash. Pedro Gellert, the former editor of Morena’s international newsletter, was one initiator. I got to know José Luis from those media meetings — which resulted in a new English-language website —and from his reporting on Venezuelanalysis. We finally met in person, at Pedro Gellert’s, when I visited Mexico City. I had been thinking about a podcast and floated the idea to José Luis.

José Luis Granados Ceja: I had been a fan of Kurt’s from his Twitter posts and from his articles in Jacobin, which provide the only regular monthly analysis about Mexico you can find anywhere, let alone from a progressive viewpoint. I was reluctant to do a podcast at first, but Kurt pushed me — thank goodness!

AMLO made his press conferences into political theater; Soberanía is similarly entertaining. How did you decide on your presentation style?

KH: We cover serious material, but if we covered it in a serious style, it could seem too heavy. I write and perform in plays — so I’m a ham! You won’t get a newscaster monotone from me. We decided to always open the same way, for consistency.

First our intros. Then a “couch gag,” something we learned from the Simpson’s cartoon TV show, which always opened with some configuration of the Simpson family on their couch. Our couch is the way we announce our title, “Soberanía!”

We have three news items every week. We hand off the lead back and forth and pepper our comments with sarcastic asides. Our final segment is “Losers and Haters,” a name we got from our friend Luisa Martinez. That’s where we have the difficult job of choosing the worst piece of journalism of the week. There is no lack of contenders!

JL: A mother told me that she and her 10-year-old son listen to Soberanía in the car on the way to school, and he loves “Losers and Haters.” His education starts before he gets to school. I love that segment too. It’s where I really blow off steam. The media malpractice we’re treated to in the mainstream press, like The New York Times, really offends me. This bilge is what passes for journalism??!

If Kurt brought theatrics, which rubbed off on me, what I brought was experience in editing and putting together a podcast. The format can make listeners feel like they’re overhearing a lively conversation, and it allows for diversions that you couldn’t do on a different platform.

Unlike most news shows, your episodes are full of historical facts and references. Why do you spend time looking backwards?

KH: Historical and cultural information is necessary to situate listeners in the Mexican context. Otherwise, the tendency is to interpret events from your own paradigm.

For example, Ernesto Zedillo, the PRI president from 1994-2000, was a recent “loser” we hated on. He wrote a piece warning about AMLO and Claudia’s authoritarianism and tyranny. We exposed the fact that massacres happened on his watch and that he engineered corrupt giveaways of the people’s money to the big banks.

Who is he to lecture on democracy??! It’s important to know what these people did, where they come from, so you recognize the blatant posturing.

And Mexican journalists living abroad, the main sources for English-language media, are mostly wealthy ex-pats whose comfortable bubbles were burst by AMLO’s priority on the poor.

JL: Let’s be clear that their job is to defend the neoliberal ideology of the billionaire class. Their job is to prove that Mexico’s 4T is a failure and that Mexico must be ostracized.

We started our first podcast in February 2024, with “Anatomy of a Hit,” when ProPublica and other media were coordinating a story that AMLO was a “narco-president,” whose 2006 campaign had been funded by cartels. They were attempting to influence the Mexican vote against Morena.

For us, that was the last straw! We traced the sources to show that the allegations had no factual basis, and that the authors were connected to right-wing think tanks. Not “reporting” — but a hit job.

A few months ago, the Mexican public TV station Canal Once, or Channel 11, offered you a show, Sin Muros, or “Without Walls.” Within a month, you had a phenomenal million viewers! Why do you think there was such an outpouring of interest, besides your charm, of course, haha!

JL: There’s a direct line from Soberanía to Canal Once. When Renata Turrent was appointed to lead Canal Once after Claudia Sheinbaum took office, she already knew us and knew our work. Canal Once had been a conservative station since its founding in 1959. But Renata understands what public broadcasting can and should be. Our show is from an unapologetically left point of view. We’re proud to be Renata’s first new show, her flagship.

KH: Our success? We’ve been at the right place at the right time. We launched Soberanía at a critical moment in Mexican history, at the end of AMLO’s term and the election season that followed. We launched Sin Muros, which focuses on US-Mexico relations, the day after Trump’s inauguration. Since that date, the relationship of the US and Mexico, Trump and Sheinbaum, has been the top attention-getter for the Mexican people, and we’re uniquely capable of explaining it.

Conservative commentators who speak English used to have the market for the coverage of Mexico cornered; English gives you more credibility on these topics. But here we come — radicals who defend Mexico in fluent English as well as fluent Spanish! Mexicans are astonished and delighted.

JL: It’s a strange new feeling when someone in a grocery store or on the street recognizes us and says, “Hey, aren’t you on “Soberanía?” I love your show!” But we’re not looking to be famous. We’re looking to provide the best English reporting on the 4T and to defend Mexico’s soberanía!