Primavera Téllez Girón García

Primavera Téllez Girón García has dedicated much of her professional life to support the development of public policies, as well as promoting the reform of the laws that regulate the right to information; media, broadcasting, telecommunications and internet in Mexico, to achieve a more democratic society. Her work is firmly rooted in reaching social justice and the respect of human rights (right to information, freedom of expression, privacy) empowering civil society through advocacy and raising investigations with a trans-disciplinary perspective, and for this she has been involved professionally with congressmen, grassroots groups, non-profits and civil society organizations, politicians, journalists, lawyers, academics and researchers.

Throughout her work, she has been in favor of encouraging collaborations for global and local changes in benefit of the common good to try to enrich and close the gaps of our fragmented public sphere, to guarantee integrity and independence in the media and journalism from those forces that control, shape and affect media and communications. Her research, with a trans-disciplinary point of view, is focused on analyzing the capture of media systems and industries in Latin America and untangling the knots of the difficult relations between media (broadcasting and newspaper companies; public media; telecoms and technology manufacturers; internet providers; community media) and power (politicians, regulation, governments, businessman, industries, organized crime) and how it impacts society and communities in several ways such as global and local social change; governance; civic actions; restricting access to information; cancelling pluralism and diversity in the media, internet, telecommunication services and content; eulogizing or slamming a politician, a political group or company, manipulating information as fake news; the inequitable distribution of the spectrum; and also generating media concentration; censorship, disappearance and murder of journalists.

Primavera holds a MA in Communication and Politics from Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Xochimilco in Mexico City. She has taught undergraduate level courses at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Universidad Intercontinental and Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana. In 2014 she was invited by CMDS to present the lecture “How can research contribute to advocacy & designing data driven communication policy campaigns” in the frame of the CMDS summer school on ‘Advocacy, Activism and the Internet: Communication Policy for Social Change’.

Primavera’s current research projects include a book and a radio programme (special edition) in collaboration with the organization Redes por la Diversidad, Equidad y Sustentabilidad A.C. (Networks for Diversity, Equity and Sustainability A.C.) on the past and the present, and challenges of the indigenous communication in Mexico and their right to manage their own media and telecom networks after the changes made in the Mexican Constitution (2013) and the enactment of the Federal Law of Telecommunications and Broadcasting (2014). She is also working on a publication and a documentary that will explain the process of international mobilization in social media and digital rights activism that became a world trending topic #EPNvsInternet against the telecommunications bill presented by the President of Mexico, which intended to censor the Internet and give more power to the monopolies in broadcasting and telecommunications. This documentary will show how organizations, civil society, academics, young people, politicians etc. reacted and organized a great movement against surveillance, to defend freedom of expression on the Internet and net neutrality that was at risk. Primavera also wants to research the influence of non-media companies in the television sector and intend to analyze what companies that are not per se broadcasting companies have been getting into media in the past ten years and how that affected journalism and pluralism. She is also interested in connecting the dots of how cyber-security has become a priority on national and international agendas and which are the interests involved in the creation of legislation that regulate the data flows in and across borders. This research will try to identify the origin of the debates that led to the set of measures and public policies on cyber-security in Mexico and the way they have been implemented.

Primavera has co-authored Nuevo Marco Regulatorio en Telecomunicaciones y Radiodifusión (New Regulatory Framework in Telecommunications and Broadcasting) (Porrua-Universidad Anáhuac, 2015.) and she has also co-authored the country report on Mexico for the “Mapping Digital Media” project that covered sixty countries worldwide and was sponsored by the Open Society Foundation.

She has co-organized diverse international forums and conferences on topics such as media broadcasting, telecommunications, freedom of expression, right to information, university broadcasters and public media. She has worked as an advisor and on the development of projects for Mexican public media such as TV UNAM and Canal 11 and for the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC). Her professional development also includes significant experience in the legislative field for her work in the Senate. She also served as director of the Mexican Association for the Right to Information (AMEDI) and foundress producer of MVS Ombudsman, the first radio program dedicated to the defense of audience rights. As a journalist Primavera worked for BBC in London. Since 2002 she writes for Zocalo magazine, a publication specialized in the analysis of the media and politics. She also hosts a weekly radio show with two journalist colleagues: Espacio Abierto (Open Space) broadcasted at the Mexican public radio Instituto Mexicano de la Radio (Mexican Institute of Radio) addresses issues related to freedom of expression and the right to information as well as the complex relations between media, politics and power, telecommunications, Internet and journalism. She is a frequent contributor and co-foundress of mediapowerminitor.com, where she publishes stories about Latin America.