By Juan Larrosa, October 13, 2025
When Claudia Sheinbaum assumed the presidency, many analysts questioned whether she would maintain the practice established by Andrés Manuel López Obrador from 2018 to 2024: offering a daily morning press conference, Monday through Friday. One year later, the answer is clear — the former president’s communication model not only continues but has been adapted and consolidated.
This model — hybrid, complex, and controversial — rests on three pillars.
The first consists of the morning press conferences, broadcast live from the National Palace and streamed across multiple digital platforms.
The second pillar is “ground communication”: weekend tours, visits, and rallies that allow the president to maintain direct contact with the population. In a recent documentary, Sheinbaum mentions that López Obrador advised her never to stop traveling, since—in his words—that is the way to stay connected with the people.
The third element is digital communication: the presidential team continuously produces and disseminates videos, clips, and posts that promote the image, work, and ideology of the president.
What has generated the most significant debate, however, are the morning press conferences themselves. Although they are called “press conferences,” their logic differs from traditional journalistic practice. In most governments, press conferences are convened in response to exceptional events — a crisis, a natural disaster, or a significant announcement. The mañaneras, by contrast, are the opposite: a daily routine.
For that reason, they fulfill multiple functions. They serve as a space for disseminating government information and as a platform for propaganda, allowing the administration to position narratives favorable to the government and counter critical discourses — often through bias or deliberate omission.
Moreover, they have become a hybrid arena where journalists from traditional media coexist with content creators and influencers, both sympathetic and critical, all competing for control of public discourse. In this political communication arena, the federal government has, on more than one occasion, attacked critical journalists and media outlets — sometimes harshly — which is undoubtedly one of the most troubling features of this communication strategy.
The mañaneras are also a ritual — a daily act, held at the same hour, meant to project the image of a government at work and of a president who rises early, works diligently, and controls the public agenda. They function simultaneously as a mechanism for internal coordination, a tool of political control, and an instrument of media dominance.
So far, Sheinbaum has maintained the core characteristics of this model, though with a less confrontational tone toward the press. It remains to be seen how this strategy will evolve in the coming years.
Finally, I would like to make a brief self-promotion: the book Public and Political Communication in Times of COVID-19: Press Conferences in Mexico, which I co-authored with three colleagues. In it, we analyze in depth the press conferences of López Obrador and those of Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico’s health spokesperson during the pandemic, expanding on some of the ideas presented in this article.
This text was originally read on the NTR Radio news program broadcast on October 14, 2025, hosted by journalist Sergio René de Dios Corona.