MEXICO CITY — At Mexico’s largest television company, the brand consultant delivered a curt assessment: Making a woman the anchor of a prime-time news show could be a terrible mistake.
Survey results showed that many Mexican men would never believe a woman — least of all Denise Maerker, the middle-aged anchor chosen for the job, who was seen as personally cold and professionally untested.
“It’s very simple; this is a bad decision by the company,” Maerker recalled the consultant telling her in that meeting, in 2016. “He said, ‘Reconsider, this is really serious.’ ”
The company, Televisa, stuck with Maerker anyway, and she went on to become the most-watched news anchor in Mexico, with three times as many viewers as her closest competitor.
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But now, she’s the one with doubts about whether she belongs.
Confronting the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who regularly uses his bully pulpit to disparage the press, the media in Mexico has become deeply polarized, consumed much of the time by a knock-down-drag-out fight with the most powerful man in the country.
Maerker is among the few remaining prominent voices who have largely avoided being pulled into the cage match. She is trying, she says, to adhere to a bedrock of independent journalism: impartiality.
On Monday, Maerker, 58, will step down from her on-air role at a time when that principle is under threat. Her defenders say it’s a loss for objectivity in a country that is increasingly divided. Her critics say that her approach is too soft and that it no longer fits in the warlike media landscape of today’s Mexico.
As the country gears up for a contentious presidential campaign, Maerker herself is starting to believe that her brand of restrained coverage will soon be harder than ever to sustain.
“There is going to be less and less room, between now and the elections, for positions that are not black or white,” she said. “There is going to be less space for people like me.”
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López Obrador has cultivated an antagonistic relationship with the media since being sworn in as president in late 2018, denigrating the press by portraying critical reporters as agents of an opposition determined to see him fail.
In a country where many of the loudest voices in the news media are either loyal defenders of the president or staunch critics, Maerker comes off as middle of the road. She keeps her tone level, tries to use as few adjectives as possible and seeks to avoid “a direct collision” with the president.
Campaigns for the 2024 presidential election will begin this year, and although politics is always a combat sport in Mexico, the approaching contest pits bitter rivals within the president’s own party against one another. The election is expected to get particularly ugly.
“Electoral season is hunting season, and conflict avoidance won’t work,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst based in Mexico City. “A television news show that does not get into that contentious vibe is condemned not to be seen or not to be relevant.”
In Mexico, combativeness was not something journalism was known for when Maerker got into the business. A political scientist by training — she has a master’s degree from the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris — Maerker landed her first broadcast role in 1997, interviewing politicians for an upstart network.
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Her producer said it was fine that she’d never been on television.
“You’re going to say, ‘Hello, good evening,’ and then you’re going to turn around and do your interview, and then you turn back and say, ‘Thank you,’ ” she recalled the producer telling her.
The country had been ruled by one party for decades, and votes had been either bought or stolen for so long that there was no need to publicly grill elected officials, experts said. That shifted, though, as elections became genuinely competitive and candidates suddenly saw value in persuading people to vote for them.
Her tiny and poor network, Channel 40, took advantage. Perhaps because they hadn’t ever really been forced to evade questions, the politicians interviewed by Maerker were remarkably unfiltered.
“Incredible things happened,” she said.
When Channel 40 went off the air in 2005, Televisa hired Maerker to host her own program.
Within a few months, she was thrust into the center of the biggest story in the country.
On Dec. 9, 2005, Televisa ran coverage of what appeared to be a dramatic arrest: Police stormed a ranch on the outskirts of the capital and detained a French woman and her Mexican boyfriend, accused of kidnapping several people for ransom.
But in the days that followed, Maerker learned from a young reporter for Televisa that the raid had been staged. She took her reporting to Leopoldo Gómez, an executive at the company.
“I went to him and said, ‘Here’s the information I already have; what do you know about this?’ ” she said. “He told me, ‘I had no idea; go with it.’ ”
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On her program, Maerker later broke the story that the televised arrest of the suspects in the actual kidnapping had been a reenactment — the suspects had been arrested a day earlier with no cameras present — and the elaborate publicity stunt became an international scandal, turning the new anchor into a budding star.