1- Who performs social communication in the media?
- Social communication in the media is carried out by the media, whose essential mission is to produce and share content to inform, educate, and entertain, in accordance with the aims of socialist society.
2- Who is part of it?
- In this area there are main media and others.
3- What are considered main media?
- They are the media organizations that have a strategic character in the construction of consensus, fulfill public service functions, and constitute political, ideological, and socio-cultural mediators.
- They include news agencies, radio, television and printed and digital media, which are the socialist property of all the people or of political, mass and social organizations, and cannot be the object of any other type of property, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.
4- How important are the main media?
- They stimulate popular participation in the economic, social, and cultural development of the country, make visible with transparency the state management and the exercise of socialist democracy, strengthen the values and identity of the nation, and mobilize social action for the defense of the interests of the people.
5- What do we mean by other media?
- Those who have specific objectives and editorial profiles, in correspondence with the mission or the economic or social activity that develops its owner.
- They may belong to organs, agencies and entities of the State, political, mass and social organizations, associative forms or other legally recognized economic and social actors, which are responsible for the management, production and distribution of their contents.
6- How do the other media work?
- As a communication complement of the mission or economic or social activity of its owner, and therefore;
- They cannot be sustained with organizational concepts and contents that violate the limits of their editorial profile, nor from structures and human, material, and financial resources that exceed the needs of the approved communicative activity;
- They guarantee their management as media organizations, whose role cannot be identical or similar to that of the main media in society; and
- The creation of these media is excluded when its management is proposed as the constitutive activity of the social object or work project of a non-state economic actor.
7- What obligations do the media have?
- To define their editorial policy and control its execution;
- To comply with its editorial profile with truthfulness, transparency, and observance of the style chart and other internal rules for their content production;
- To generate public self-regulation procedures that allow them to perform their functions responsibly and in accordance with ethical principles;
- To comply with regulations on copyright protection;
- To respond to the claims of natural and legal persons who consider themselves unfairly affected by published content;
- To assume public reparation in the material or moral order of the natural and legal persons who claim it in the administrative or judicial sphere, if this is decided in the corresponding process;
- To respect the right of the accused and accused to be presumed innocent;
- To ensure that the national or foreign communication products to be published respect the provisions of the Constitution, this Law, and other normative provisions.
- To keep the information and programs published, and have the obligation to provide them to natural and legal persons who consider themselves unfairly affected by these contents, for presentation as evidence in the claims, administrative procedures and judicial processes they promote.
8- What responsibilities do the main media have?
- To privilege in their agendas, according to editorial profile, the contents that respond to the interests and priorities of the nation and the communicative needs of the audiences;
- To act with immediacy, opportunity, and strategic foresight, in accordance with the particularities of its editorial profile and communicative production;
- To ensure in their management the critical reflection of reality and the exercise of opinion on the basis of responsible research and analysis;
- To ensure citizen participation in the management of content, including the debate on issues of interest to society and communication actions that promote the exercise of popular control;
- To monitor and evaluate the quality, diversity, and impact of its communicative production;
- To prioritize in their content management those that contribute to the education of audiences and the promotion in them of critical thinking, of social equality, non-discriminatory, and decolonizing;
- To prioritize the production of communicative proposals aimed at entertainment, which ethically and responsibly promote personal and collective well-being;
- To implement strategies and projects that systematically increase the reach and visibility of their content in cyberspace;
- To stimulate creativity and raise the aesthetic level of their communicative products;
- To ensure the functioning of editorial and programming boards and other spaces for professional dialog;
- To enhance the management of science, technology, and innovation in their social communication processes;
- To promote the participation of people in the elaboration, implementation, and evaluation of public policies, as part of the processes of popular control;
- To promote the generation of content aimed at children, adolescents, young people, and older adults;
- To preserve their heritage funds and facilitate access to them, with emphasis on those that constitute the historical memory of the nation;
- To educate audiences in knowledge of the social functions of science, technology, and innovation;
- To achieve in the spaces intended for promotions the coherent dissemination of content for political, public good, self-promotion, and commercial purposes, in accordance with the public service function of these media;
- To guarantee the social research processes that require the production of content and its evaluation; and
- To develop cooperative relations with other national and international media.
9- Who is most responsible for enforcing editorial policy in the main media?
- The director of each main media, who must also ensure the participation of his professionals and audiences in the management of the priorities of that policy.
- Like the owners of other media, they have the obligation to register them in the national registries authorized for such purposes, from what is regulated in this Law 162/2023 and its regulatory provisions and other legislation in force.
10- What are the rights of journalists and other professionals who manage social communication in the media?
- To carry out, within the framework of legality, the professional actions necessary to obtain the truthful, objective and timely information required to fulfill their functions;
- To participate in the editorial management of their medium;
- To denounce those acts by persons or organizations that offer erroneous content, hinder access to information, or limit the fulfillment of their functions;
- To publicly protect the identity of the source that has requested to remain anonymous, in compliance with the ethical precepts of the profession; and
- To carry out works of journalistic collaboration outside the functions and duties corresponding to their use, as stipulated in current legislation.
11- What are the duties of these professionals?
- To inform with immediacy, coherence, precision, and attachment to the truth;
- To observe the rules of verification, contextualization, and verification of the information to be used;
- To have the consent of persons for the recording of their statements;
- To refrain from accepting economic contributions or any personal benefits that compromise their ethics and the prestige of the environment they represent;
- Not to carry out journalistic collaboration or other editorial contribution to media of social communication whose contents contravene the Constitution, the present Law, and other normative provisions; and
- To ensure that their professional work and social projection are consistent with the editorial policy of their medium.