They ask for clarification of audience rights in the new telecommunications law.
The rights of users and audiences should be established in the new Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law, not in self-regulatory guidelines as is currently the case, José Antonio García Herrera and Lenin Martell agreed.
“And I think so, I mean, the truth is that establishing audience rights or regulating them through guidelines from an agency like the Agency (for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications) is also dangerous; I also believe they should be included in the law,” responded García Herrera, president of the Chamber of the Radio and Television Industry (CIRT), to Senator Javier Corral’s specific question about whether “audience rights should be included in guidelines or in the law.”
And he insisted, during his participation in the fifth and final panel organized by the Senate to discuss the new law in progress, that there should be more self-regulation because any regulation of content can lead to censorship.
“That is the grave risk we see,” he said.
For Martell, an audience advocate for the Mexican State Public Broadcasting System, the rights of users and audiences to compel communicators to differentiate between opinion and information must be specified in the new legislation.
Corral, secretary of the Senate's Radio, Television, and Cinematography Committee and moderator of the panel discussions, explained that radio and television licensees already have an obligation in their codes of ethics to distinguish between information and opinion, but that "ethics does not replace the law. Ethics is binding on licensees, but the law is binding on everyone and guarantees the citizen's rights against the licensee."
And so he asked: “Should the rights of audiences be enshrined in law, or not?
García Herrera stated that the proposed law represents “a setback.”
“Let's be honest, any regulation of broadcast radio and television is only a threat, because all other media outlets in this country—OTTS, streaming, and digital sites—are unregulated… We're experiencing a setback with this initiative. We must be very careful because freedom of expression is the fundamental element of democracy in any country. And if we threaten and over-regulate media content excessively, as with radio and television, we are obviously undermining freedom of expression and democracy in this country,” he said.
For Leopoldo Maldonado, regional director of Article 19's office for Mexico and Central America, the rights of the public are not inherently contradictory to the right to freedom of expression; "not in principle, although they could be. They are part of society's right to truthful and timely information, as recognized in Article 6 of the Constitution."
Eleconomista
