UPDATE: The worded battle is now a legal war, as the Healy Group just released a statement saying that it will sue the Governor and Baja's five mayors who signed the letter for "moral damages".

TIJUANA.- As we have already been reporting, a battle of words between Healy Group (the owners of Frontera, La Cronica, and Frontera Ensenada) and the government of Baja California has overtaken the headlines over the past couple of days. The government claims that the news group has engaged in extortion tactics, requesting more money for advertisement space in exchange for more favorable news coverage.

The Healy Group in Baja Calfironia has argued in their defense, "is it really extortion and defamation to inform.. about" and they listed a series of issues that have been covered over the past weeks throughout the state, ranging from topics of the Tecate mayor's salary (accusing it of being high, without any claim of impropriety), to problems with projects in Tijuana such as the disastrous bike lane that was scrapped less than a month after its inauguration and labeled by the mayor himself as a failure. In fact, the mayor asked the head of transportation at the time to step down. There are also numerous articles that report on the homes owned by Governor Vega, without any claims of illicit financing but just rather with claims that it looks bad.

The government officials point out that isn't truly the problem here. But, over the past few weeks and before this bombardment of negative headlines, Frontera, La Cronica, and Frontera Ensenada were still negotiating with Baja's governor and requesting twenty-six million pesos, plus VAT, (around $2 million USD) worth of advertising for:

"Daily coverage of the Governor's Activities and those of his wife in all Baja publications, "premium ad space" "chats" "social media coverage" "editorial and opinion piece coverage"

The information that we have obtained is similar to that of other outlets, that the Healy Group asked for exorbitant amounts of money in exchange for favorable coverage, and when the government of Baja California refused to these terms, they started a negative media campaign to force their hand.

Although not outright labeled "favorable", the coverage package (if you could call it that) include basic media coverage, and it is widely accepted that media outlets offer these services in exchange for ad funds.

However, just to give you an idea, last year alone, Frontera, La Cronica, and Frontera Ensenada received about 9 million, an amount similar to their competitors. Which means that their demands for 2015 are three times the previous year's amount.

Some of these facts were disclosed to SanDiegoRed via government sources, stating that the the open letter to the public wast signed on Thursday. On Wednesday, the five municipalities and the government decided to prepare a united response against Healy Group to be circulated the next day, bearing the signature of all five mayors and Governor Vega.

The negotiations started to turn into threats of initiating a smear campaign in Baja California in all of its municipalities, against all of the politicians that did not comply with the demands. The amounts demanded, when compared to last year, and to what other local media such as El Mexicano, La Voz, y El sol de Tijuana, is more than triple the market rate.

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According to these same sources, Frontera sought to obtain around 15 million pesos just from Tijuana's city government alone, just to continue with the same media coverage as always. Not only was this request exorbitant, but it was also more than a third of the budget of what the city of Tijuana has designated for political and public ad space, as confirmed by Mayor Astiazaran.

We will not go into the validity of the headlines that Healy's outlets have published, and nobody denies that many of the facts that they publish are truthful and are truly a source of concern. That is the point of a free press as stated by Mayor Astiazaran yesterday and in the very letter signed by the government officials.

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That is not the problem with the coverage, the problem is that this negative coverage is a direct result of Frontera, La Cronica, and Frontera Ensenada not getting the money that they were asking for, and is also part of a larger problem of Mexican median still too dependent of government advertising to sustain themselves, especially in the era of the Internet.

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jose.sanchez@sandiegored.com

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