Dpto. Ciencias Políticas, Ética y Sociología

Una democracia deliberativa debe estar caracterizada por el principio de justicia de participación de todos los afectados en los asuntos de su interés. Sin embargo, este principio no se cumple en muchos ámbitos de la comunicación social, donde los afectados por la información o los contenidos de los medios no son debidamente tenidos en cuenta, lo que hace que su tratamiento no sea correcto o sea incompleto. Ello es algo especialmente grave en el caso de que estos afectados estén además en una condición de infrarrepresentación y, por tanto, vulnerabilidad mediática. Esto ocurre con la información sobre las personas mayores, donde la presencia de éstas no se produce ni con la amplitud ni con la calidad debida en las noticias y contenidos que les afectan. Este artículo presenta datos que ponen en evidencia este hecho. Se trata de datos obtenidos en un cuestionario enviado a cien profesionales de medios especializados en los contenidos para personas mayores en España. Los resultados reflejan, entre otros aspectos, en qué medida dichos profesionales consideran baja o muy baja la presencia de las personas mayores en los medios de comunicación, y sirven para sensibilizar sobre la imagen discriminatoria que a menudo trasladan sobre ellas. Los datos corroboran también que la imagen que se traslada desde los medios es estereotipada, no muestra la imagen plural de este colectivo y, por tanto, no se ajusta a su realidad. / A deliberative democracy should be characterized by the principle of justice regarding the participation of those affected in matters of interest to them. However, this principle is not always satisfied in many areas of social communication. This becomes particularly serious in the case of those who are affected by such matters but are in a vulnerable condition. This is the case in the area of information concerning older people, who remain underrepresented in terms of both quantity and quality in content related to them. This article presents data that highlight this fact, obtained from a questionnaire sent to 100 media professionals specialized in content for the elderly in Spain. The results of this questionnaire reflect, among other aspects, the extent to which professionals specialized in this field consider the presence of older people in the media to be low or very low and also serve to raise awareness of the discriminatory image that the media often transmits. The data obtained from the questionnaire sent to professionals also confirm that the image transmitted by the media is stereotyped, does not show the plural image of this group, and therefore does not fit its reality.

Over the past decade, the problems arising from social communication have yet again become burning issues on social and political agendas. Information disorder, hate speeches, information manipulation, social networking sites, etc., have obliged the most important European institutions to reflect on how to meet the collective challenges that social communication currently poses in the new millennium. These European Institutions have made a clear commitment to self-regulation. The article reviews some recent European initiatives to deal with information disorder that has given a fundamental role to self-regulation. To then carry out a theoretical review of the normative notion of self-regulation that distinguishes it from the neo-liberal economicist conception. To this end, (1) a distinction is drawn between the (purportedly) self-regulating market and (2) a broader conception of self-regulation inherent not to media companies or corporations, but to the social subsystem of social communication, is proposed. This involves increasing the number of self-regulatory mechanisms that may contribute to improve social communication, and reinforcing the commitment of those who should exercise such self-regulation, including not only media companies but also the professionals working at them and the public at large.