Controlling News in New Mexico

One of the inherited peculiarities of the electronic world is the lack of a television station in the second-largest city in New Mexico. The local news comes from El Paso, Texas, and it is mostly about El Paso and Texas. That reception is an extra charge on the satellite billing. We get the 4-5 Mexican stations for free. I do not understand it and I will not try to explain it. The city of Las Cruces is a peculiar bastion of controlling factions that revolve around the making of money and the saving of souls.

Here you have the usual city limits that people usually understand. Then there is the more recent, from the 1980's, five-miles or so, extension of the city limits that is a no-man's land of thousands of citizens who have a Las Cruces address and pay taxes to the county. This was approved by the NM State Legislature on closing day after a visit by a committee of developers and realtors the night before. That must have been expensive, but, oh, the rewards!

Cable television is only in the city limits and the deal was made with Comcast. The City has its own channel which it broadcasts City Council meetings repeatedly from the historical Inquisitional room with its crosses of the Trinity as part of the ongoing proselytizing by the city government. If a citizen has something to say to the City Council they have to stand before the large Latin crosses to address the Council while they look at the crosses on the podium. These Christian crosses are the same ones that federal Judge Robert Brack ruled were not religious and this was parroted by the trois singes federal panel in Denver. That must have been really expensive.

The major newspapers, Santa Fe New Mexican, Albuquerque Journal, and the Las Cruces Sun-News reflect the 'intellect' of New Mexico of the number of letters they publish. The New Mexican and the Journal publish many daily Letters to the Editor. The Sun-News restricts the letters to two per day and then on Sunday there may be a whole page of letters - maybe ten. With the Sun-News you are allowed one letter submission every two weeks. Your letter may be a response to something the City is about, but you never know if or when your letter will be published. If your letter is published and someone makes a reply, and in all fairness you wish to or need to respond to that letter it may be weeks in between. By then all is forgotten except by those fair-minded citizens who make threatening phone calls.

In this electronic age the Albuquerque Journal daily paper edition is almost impossible to have delivered to the hinterland and their electronic edition is too expensive. Plus the news is like Ivory soap - 99.99% northern New Mexico. The New Mexican and the Sun-News have limited editions you can access for free. You can even make comments using your real name or an anonymous name to letters and news reports - sometimes. The rules of posting a comment are arbitrary and your comment will be excised if too controversial like - the truth.

While the above is about the daily newspapers, we have a weekly, The Las Cruces Bulletin, that the Sun-News is allowing to produce and control the majority of local news. You can read the Bulletin on its web page, but you can't make comments. The letters are restricted to two-three a week. Religious activities rceive a wide coverage which includes a lot of ads from the City with its crosses symbol on each ad and the dripping cross in the County ads are in color mostly.

The more recent decision by the City was to stop the bookmobile service in the county. A serious breach of citizens' rights to stop the flow of information and knowledge. They don't want people reading books that aren't on the approved list.

You can see how all this interacts to control the news in southern New Mexico that is more historically attuned to letting religious agencies decide what one needs to know about the world.