2023-08-13 07:23:52
“There were many emails sent by readers for publication in today’s Central Mail, with content that –in one sense or another– would constitute violations of the electoral ban. For this reason – and not for other reasons, let alone censorship – is that this ombudsman discarded the messages linked to current politics. What our readers demand or propose is, to a large extent, what PROFILE recognizes and responds to in most cases. This leads one to wonder how much influence their opinions and positions, favorable or critical, have when deciding what to publish, how to do it and when”.
The quotation mark corresponds to the initial section of the column that this ombudsman published in August 2019, in the middle of the pre-electoral process that led to the presidential elections of that year. This is what happens today, when the ban imposed by the PASO limits the dissemination of proposals, ideas, comments and positions in any of the political senses that can influence the readers of PROFIL.
By the way, what it is regarding today is measuring how much value the readers’ opinions expressed in the emails published by the Post and also comments outside that section have. It is a lot, and it has a growing dimension in the assessment that media editors make around the world when it comes to directing their publications.
In the same column from 2019, reference was made to an episode that affected one of the most influential newspapers in the world, The New York Times. This ombudsman explained: “NYT readers –particularly Democrats– reacted virulently to what they considered a headline clearly favorable to the US president: ‘Trump incites (or urges) unity once morest racism’, read the headline. cover of Tuesday 6 (August 2019), citing statements by the US president without commenting that his xenophobic and racist outbursts are already proverbial. The reaction was immediate: while well-known buyers of the newspaper announced the drop in their subscriptions, the editors chose to change the title in the second edition and apologize publicly for what they defined as an error at closing time. They thus surrendered to the pressure of their readers.
In short, it is regarding evaluating the role played by public opinion as the recipient of the messages downloaded by the media. Defining what public opinion is is a challenge that has not yet been fully resolved. In a work published in 2009 by the Spanish Anthropology Gazeta, Professor José María Rubio Ferreres, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Granada, wrote: “Despite the difficulty of finding a general and unequivocal definition of public opinion that it is acceptable for most of your studies, this ‘does not mean, however, that public opinion is in any sense meaningless. The concept continues to be used in research, in articles regarding government, and in explanations of human social behavior, both scientifically and otherwise. And the very fact of its continued use can be taken as strong testimony to the existence of meaning’ (Price 1994: 18)”.
Public opinion is a communicative and psychosocial phenomenon that depends on the historical and sociocultural context. For this reason, the influence that societies exert on editorial policies is growing, and is further strengthened following the explosive appearance of social networks as a counterpart, sometimes a complement and always a mirror of traditional media (newspapers, radio, television, portals news).
It is the subject of a still unresolved debate to measure how far such influence reaches.
1691911691
#ban #puts #limits #opinions #readers
