T
v Aztec no It was not born as an autonomous cultural phenomenon nor as an isolated business venture; It was born as an ideological-commercial oligarch’s slap in his neoliberal alliances as a vector of a semiotics of power that found in television a prosthesis for the reproduction of its stupidity. The favors of power were televised.
Its entire history – from its express privatization to the consolidation of its sensationalist, doctrinaire and commercial rhetoric – is a chronicle of how media capital merges with the political power that it manipulates to manufacture consensus, discipline perceptions and naturalize privileges. The phrase “the favors of power were televised” is not a moral judgment, but a materialist description: there were benefits, there were pacts, there were political shielding mechanisms, there was propaganda disguised as entertainment, and all of this became a spectacle so that the relationship between the ruling elite and the media elite seemed normal, inevitable, even patriotic.
A semiotic-historical analysis requires reviewing the origin of the television sign that Tv Azteca reproduces. It is not just about images: it is a regime of signs. The screen functions as a simplification, dramatization and alignment device. The corporate television sign is articulated around three semiotic operations: first, spectacularization, which converts all social conflict into entertainment to neutralize it; second, personalization, which reduces the class struggle to an individual and sentimental drama; third, commodification, which turns even misfortune into a commodity. Tv Azteca specialized in these operations from its origin, because this corresponded to the political demand of its birth, to offer symbolic stability to the same power that gave it concessions, regulatory advantages and a practically captive advertising market. A lot of stuff and a lot of government propaganda spending.
When in the 90s the Mexican State transferred part of its television power to the new company, it was not democratizing the spectrum: it was replacing a state-private monopoly with a duopoly functional to the emerging neoliberal model. The semiotics of obedience were reconfigured. Tv Azteca appears as “competition”, but in reality it is a reinforced double, two mouths for a single dominant ideology. The sign of plurality operated as a mask. At the same time, it was sold as a collective imagination in which television was no longer just entertainment, but rather a moral arbiter, emotional judge and political guide. Although the company presented itself as the media modernization of Mexico, in reality it acted as an amplifier of the policy of economic dispossession that was advancing and as a legitimizer of governments that benefited from the symbolic violence that it itself produced. The semiotics of the “country that advances” was built against the current of the social reality that was deteriorating. With a lot of football.
On the TV Azteca screen, political favors were not only mentioned, they were narrated as epic. They disguised themselves as business success, economic patriotism or generational renewal. Political power needed a medium that dramatized the narrative of New Mexico: competitive, privatized, “global,” obedient to financial capital. And Tv Azteca complied. Their newscasts manufactured an aesthetic of urgency, in which social conflict was minimized or presented as an anomaly, never as a structural consequence. Their opinion programs functioned as devices of symbolic persecution against anyone who threatened the stability of the regime. Semiotics is not just content: it is tone, it is rhythm, it is framing, it is silence. Tv Azteca mastered the art of strategic silences, which are as ideological as its editorials.
Your private television does not limit itself to informing: it encodes behaviors. The semiotic history of Tv Azteca is the story of how a nation was taught to watch. Look at the poor with distrust, with fascination at the millionaire, with submission at the powerful, with morbidity at crime, with indifference to the social origin of violence. The screen built a country where inequality appears as a natural landscape, where suffering becomes a spectacle and where corruption is a momentary scandal that does not alter the hierarchical order. In this narrative, political power always appears as an arbitrator, never as a structural person responsible. This is how favors are televised: turning complicity into a landscape, violence into rating and injustice in custom.
This historical semiotics of Tv Azteca necessarily includes the legal architecture that supports it. Tailor-made laws, eternal concessions, lax or non-existent regulations and a political class that uses the screen as a black market for legitimacy. Reciprocity is total, power guarantees business; the business guarantees the narrative. Thus, the company becomes an unofficial ministry of ideology, one that operates without the need for uniforms or solemn speeches, because its power lies in naturalness, in the viewer believing that what they see is “reality.” That is the supreme victory of bourgeois semiotics, when it is no longer felt as ideology, but as common sense. And all without paying taxes.
Its semiotic history as a company is still present. Every newscast, every novel, every reality It reproduces a semiotic order that makes the causes invisible and displays the consequences, that blames those below and excuses those above, that turns politics into scandal and scandal into merchandise. In this circuit, power is televised not to be understood, but to be accepted.
It is the company that power needed and that contributed to consolidating a model of social control in which obedience is a spectacle. The favors of power were televised, yes, but not as exceptions, as normality. The screen did not show complicity, it celebrated it. He didn’t hide it, he aestheticized it. He did not denounce it, he made it part of the national identity.
That is the core of the problem: as long as television continues to be a device to anesthetize critical consciousness, any emancipatory project must confront its semiotics, dismantle its signs, reveal its operations and dispute its hegemony. Because the story of Tv Azteca is a lesson about how power is transmitted not only by decrees, but by images; not only by laws, but by narratives; not only by coercion, but by “seduction.” And as long as that machinery remains intact, democracy will be a stage set and truth a commodity.
