Mexican TV anchor Jacobo Zabludovsky dies at 87

Jacobo Zabludovsky, a journalist who for decades was seen as a symbol of the tight links between Mexico’s government and press, died Thursday at the age of 87.

Zabludovsky anchored Mexico’s most-viewed evening news program for almost three decades, until 1998, covering the nation’s tragedies but also reflecting a solidly pro-government political line while working for a the dominant Televisa network.

It all made him the face of the news, but also the face of a system that many considered repressive, though he later adopted a more independent stance in his second career as host of a radio news program.

“He will be more remembered for the stage when he was a virtual spokesman for (governmental) power,” wrote Julio Hernandez Lopez, a columnist for the newspaper La Jornada.

The news manager for Zabludovsky’s radio program on Grupo Radio Centro, Arturo Corona, confirmed the death. Televisa said in a tweet that he died of a stroke.

The rail-thin, energetic anchor spent some seven decades in broadcast and print journalism, interviewing figures such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in his youth.

He was perhaps best known for his coverage of the country’s 1985 earthquake, which killed 9,500 people.

Equipped with an early version of a mobile phone, Zabludovsky gave viewers a tour of the stunning damage in the city’s center.

But he was widely reviled, along with most of the rest of the country’s press, for downplaying the 1968 army massacre of students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco square.

One of the darkest chapters of his professional history came in the 1988 presidential elections, which pitted leftist upstart Cuauhtemoc Cardenas against Carlos Salinas of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI. Salinas eked out a narrow victory many claimed was the result of fraud.

Zabludovsky’s program, “24 Horas,” gave Salinas 141 minutes of total coverage over a two and a half month period; the program gave Cardenas about nine minutes.

President Enrique Pena Nieto, who returned the PRI to power in 2012 elections, wrote in a tweet that “I regret the death of the lawyer, chronicler and journalist, Jacobo Zabludovsky.”

In interviews in later years, Zabludovsky acknowledged the government had pressured journalists earlier in his career.

He revived his reputation among many with a brisk, folksy daily radio news broadcast in which he gave significant space to anti-government figures, and as a campaigner for cleaning up the historic center of Mexico City where he was born.

Zabludovsky was to be buried at Mexico City’s Jewish cemetery. He is survived by three children and his wife. His brother, noted architect Abraham Zabludovsky, died in 2003.