Mexico
Mexico is an information ecosystem under pressure from ongoing violence against journalists, declining trust in news, and financial challenges facing traditional media. Social and video networks dominate news consumption, pushing outlets to adapt formats, distribution channels, and monetisation strategies while also experimenting with AI.
The Mexican political context in 2025 was shaped by international tensions and domestic security challenges, including an intensification of actions against organised crime by the government of Claudia Sheinbaum. A key episode in February 2026 involved the killing of a major cartel leader, ‘El Mencho’, which triggered a violent backlash. This widely covered episode highlighted some recurring challenges of a media environment where journalism is often dangerous to practise and professional reporting competes for attention on social media. Videos recorded by citizens went hand-in-hand with a wave of false and misleading content, making it difficult to establish an accurate picture of events as they unfolded.1
The ‘Mañanera del Pueblo’, a morning press conference format inherited from former President López Obrador, remains a central means of communication for the Sheinbaum government, though confrontation and attacks on the media have diminished compared to the previous administration. The environment for practising journalism nonetheless remains dangerous. Mexico recorded nine journalist killings in 2025, the second-highest total globally behind only Palestine, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF); a further 28 journalists remain missing. This level of violence has a chilling effect on watchdog journalism, making coverage of organised crime and corruption very dangerous.2 Furthermore, the international human rights organisation Article 19 reported an increase in judicial harassment of journalists in 2025, highlighting the growing use of legal and administrative mechanisms as tools to pressure and censor the press.
Social media remains the most important source of news, with two-thirds of the population (66%) saying they use it weekly. Traditional and digital-native brands maintain a strong presence on networks like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, many of them adapting storytelling or repackaging content. Audiovisual formats are especially popular in Mexico, where the vast majority say they have watched an online news video in the last week. Spotify (and to a lesser degree Apple) is also an important distribution platform for long-form radio programmes, as well as shorter daily news podcasts like N+ Diario and Infobae's Las Noticias del Día (MX).
After several years of stability, trust in news dropped 5pp this year to just 31%. In a context of eroded trust in institutions, individual news creators and influencers play an important role, seen by some as more authentic and relatable than news brands. Established journalists like Carlos Loret de Mola (LatinUs), Carmen Aristegui, and Joaquín López Dóriga draw considerable attention on digital platforms, where creators operating outside of institutional media have also grown in popularity, some of them politically aligned.
In terms of structure, the market remains highly concentrated. Large traditional brands like N+ and El Universal coexist with digital-native media that have achieved prominence, such as Aristegui Noticias and LatinUs, along with platforms linked to telecommunications like UnoTV. Weekly television use for news has dropped to 34%, nearly half of what it was in 2017, reflected in the financial crisis confronting TV Azteca: mounting debts and fiscal pressures led shareholders to approve a voluntary bankruptcy process in early 2026 to restructure the company's finances and liabilities, 3 alongside a merger of Azteca Noticias and ADN 40’s news operations. Meanwhile, public service media in Mexico continue to have low audience reach.
Free distribution remains dominant online, sustained by advertising, but a shift towards subscription models is underway. Newspapers like El Universal, Milenio, and Reforma have continued to bolster their paywalled content, including exclusive features, columns, and investigations, delivered with reduced or no advertising, with brands like El País (Spain) also offering access to exclusive events. Some news organisations, like digital outlet Animal Político, also continue to produce newsletters as a way to build direct relationships with audiences that are less vulnerable to platform algorithms.
Artificial intelligence is progressively becoming more embedded in newsroom operations. Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM), for example, has created a designated unit to integrate AI into production and distribution of journalistic pieces. El Economista developed LANA, an AI assistant that draws on its archive to help journalists develop summaries, story ideas, and follow-up coverage. Elsewhere, it is used to automate, optimise, and, in rare cases, generate content. In one bold experiment, Azteca Noticias used AI to recreate the operation that resulted in the killing of ‘El Mencho’, based on information provided by Mexican authorities.4
María Elena Gutiérrez-Rentería and Bernardo Flores-Heymann
Universidad Panamericana
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Weekly use of social media for news has broadly remained stable over the past decade. However, television use continues to decline (down 5pp this year), widening the gap between the two.
Pay for online news
15%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
45%
(+1)
Trust in news overall
31%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news has dipped to 31%, its lowest level since 2017, in a context of low trust in public institutions and political actors. However, trust in individual news brands fares better, with over 60% of respondents expressing trust in news brands like CNN en Español and Milenio, as well as local television, radio, or newspapers.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
122/180
Score 45.23
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-02-25/the-use-of-ai-and-bots-behind-the-wave-of-digital-disinformation-about-the-fall-of-el-mencho.html
2 https://latamjournalismreview.org/articles/how-violence-hostile-rhetoric-and-economic-precarity-undercut-mexicos-watchdog-press/
3 https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/mexicos-tv-azteca-announces-bankruptcy-proceedings-2026-02-26/