Gendered mediation and political/electoral preferences in opinion journalism covering the presidential debates in Mexico

To understand the effect of gendered mediation on the expression of political and electoral preferences, 170 opinion pieces were analyzed. These articles had been published in the newspapers El Universal, La Jornada, and Reforma after the debates organized during Mexico’s 2024 presidential campaign, in which a woman emerged victorious for the first time in the nation’s history. The analysis of discursive actions –self-construction of the speaker, construction of interlocutors, and construction of adversaries– made it possible to determine how gendered mediation shaped five dominant frames: the emphasis on the figure of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as the strategist behind Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s candidacy; the construction of the debates by means of war metaphors; the insistence on the female candidates’ emotionality; the allusion to their physical appearance as a recurring theme; and the symbolic violence expressed in the various ways in which they were named. These frames evidence the persistence of sexist and misogynistic characteristics reinforcing partisan political journalism in the hegemonically male media sphere.