Televisa & Azteca Show Their Hands
Over 900,00 people live in the Mexicali metropolitan area.
If you include nearby towns in Baja California, over 1 million people in Mexican territory felt the quake, the largest to hit northern Mexico in over 40 years.
While it happened, however, no mention of it appeared on the nation's airwaves.
In fact, not until the end of regular programming - long after rescue efforts had begun - did either major network report the event.
Awkward Silence
Without a passing text across the screen on either network, the non-reaction seemed strangely in sync.
Milenio Online wondered: "What can TV viewers like you and I do? More importantly, what are Televisa and TV Azteca going to do?
The answer is probably nothing - at least not for the foreseeable future.
Tenochtitlan, Mexico City
The event provides a telling glimpse into a deeply embedded bias in a deeply centralized nation.
The roots for centralized rule in Mesoamerica result from hundreds of years of orders from above and always from the same place.
Despite a population of nearly 110 million, Mexico currently has only two national TV channels. Yet the fear of relinquishing the broadcast media's role as an instrument of control makes reform practically impossible.
Mexican political parties already have their hands full of feisty newspaper editors and the internet to worry about another TV channel.
And why permit decisionmaking in Torreon or Mérida when the oligarchs live in the capital? In this case, power does trump money.
On the Ball?
Maybe Televisa and Azteca believed that their audience wouldn't be interested in tremors up north. Or perhaps they just didn't care enough to interupt a "classic" match between Chivas and América (Televisa) or a musical reality show (Azteca).
We'll probably never know the details. The lapse was nonetheless a lucid reminder of what nearly everyone already knows, a rare moment when the oligarchs showed their hand.
For a couple of days, it seemed sharp Mexicans in the national newsroom were genuinely startled.
Maybe that in itself means something.
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