Cynthia Ottaviano, president of the Ibero-American Organization of Audience Ombudspeople, explains how audience rights offices work and how they can help resolve conflicts between media outlets and their audiences.
Latin America, in recent years, has seen a growing debate over how to guarantee not only press freedom but also the public’s right to receive reliable information.
In principle, the two goals complement each other: Citizens in a democracy need rigorous information to make decisions, while news organizations need the freedom to produce it. But in practice, concerns have emerged that one could limit the other.
Audience ombudspeople argue that some media outlets have not established sufficient standards to ensure their information is rigorous and provides adequate context. Some media organizations, for their part, fear that the debate over better news practices could be used by governments to impose what constitutes quality information and open the door to censorship.
The debate escalated in Mexico this year, when the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission opened a public consultation on regulations to formalize audience rights. During the consultation, media organizations warned(opens in new tab) the proposal could allow the government to use audience complaints to pressure media outlets and give it leeway to intervene in their content. The final version(opens in new tab) says that the commission will not review(opens in new tab) content or editorial decisions.
Cynthia Ottaviano, president of the Ibero-American Organization of Audience Ombudspeople(opens in new tab) (OID), has been at the center of this debate for years. She was the first public media ombudsperson in Argentina(opens in new tab), a government position she held from 2012 to 2016, where she served as a bridge between media outlets and audiences to find solutions, without sanctions, when the public believed its rights had been violated. She later became the founding president of the Ibero-American organization, where her second term ends in September.
As part of LatAm Journalism Review’s (LJR) 5 Questions series, Ottaviano discussed her vision for diverse, de-patriarchalized and de-commercialized information, and why audience rights remain a contentious issue.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
1. LJR: Let’s start with the basics. What’s an audience ombudsperson’s office, and what does it do?
Cynthia Ottaviano: An audience ombudsperson’s office is a space for defending the rights of audiences, understood as full rights-holders within a framework that treats communication as a human right. Understanding information as a social good, rather than a commodity, creates a new paradigm in which everyone has the right to give and receive information, seek it out and distribute it — as part of freedom of expression — while also having the ability to file a complaint with a specific, specialized institution when that human right to communication is harmed.
There’s no authority to impose sanctions — that’s the defining characteristic of audience ombudspersons — but there’s a strong and important educational and dialogical role in creating spaces for debate, reflection and agreements around good professional practices, as well as building consensus around the different conflicts that arise in the field of communication. For example, when information is inaccurate and-or defamatory, or when there are situations or scenes involving violence during what is considered protected viewing hours for children and adolescents.
2. The issue of audience rights is not new. The OID was founded in 2014, yet it remains a sometimes contentious issue, as the recent case in Mexico showed. Why should audience rights be discussed?
Talking about audience rights is absolutely fundamental. If communication is a human right, the government has a role as guarantor of that human right to communication, and people have the right to their own voice and lived experience.
Communication is the air that democracies breathe. It’s necessary to deeply humanize communication, especially today as we navigate our relationship with AI, bots and the various problems associated with fake news and infodemics.
Recognizing the different interests at play in the field of communication, and recognizing media outlets as mechanisms that shape meaning according to certain interests, is what creates, in quotation marks, these controversies. Often, those who have historically positioned themselves as owners of communication defend their own interests, which do not always coincide with the interests of society as a whole. But in reality, this is about defending audience rights, which are part of the responsibilities and obligations of communication professionals when providing information that’s socially relevant.
3. Could you give me an example in which an audience ombudsperson’s office has — or has not — succeeded in correcting a journalistic practice?
One of the most notable and clear achievements has involved advertising, particularly sexist advertisements(opens in new tab) for cleaning products, alcoholic beverages and hygiene products.
In another case, Argentine television aired images of children whose eyes had been barely pixelated while saying they were responsible for the killing of a police officer(opens in new tab). That raised an alarm because the consequences of killing a police officer are very serious, not only within the judicial system but also among security forces. And those children had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were actors. They had acted in a movie as criminals.
To report the story, [the channel] used archival footage. The confusion arose because the theater group was from the same working-class neighborhood where the police officer had actually been killed. But the fact was that the channel had put a group of teenagers’ lives at risk. The mother came to file a complaint with the ombudsperson’s office because she had contacted the channel and had not received a response. She was desperate because her son was at risk of being killed. We were able to quickly open a dialogue with the channel and secure an apology and an acknowledgment that those children had absolutely nothing to do with the killing and were actors.
The error was corrected in the archive, where the material was labeled so the mistake would not be repeated. Training was also provided on news media responsibilities. One of the guides we produced addressed the responsible coverage and treatment of crime news(opens in new tab). We also produced a guide on institutional violence(opens in new tab), distinguishing crime cases from cases involving institutional violence. The channel also worked to highlight positive aspects, such as the theater group, which was creating alternatives not only from a social and educational perspective but also in terms of employment.
We also [responded] at the time to responsible coverage of issues involving the LGBTQ+ community(opens in new tab), as well as the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and their perspectives.
4. In contexts where regulations exist, how can the protection of audiences and their rights be balanced with press freedom? In other words, how can this be done so the law is not used as a mechanism to control content or even, eventually, as a form of censorship?
No, censorship under no circumstances. Censorship is prohibited. Regulatory mechanisms are not the only way to reach agreements — quite the contrary.
It’s also very important to raise awareness about fake news, hate speech and the new mechanisms that violate the human right to communication, and to work to strengthen democracies rather than weaken them.
5. One of the concerns raised in the case of Mexico involved the possible “misuse” of audience complaints for the specific purpose of attacking content that someone does not like. In an increasingly polarized society, how can we prevent this right from becoming a tool for challenging content simply because it contradicts an audience member’s beliefs?
It’s not about whether someone likes something or not, or about opinion. That’s a different matter.
The human right to communication is violated when inaccurate information is provided, when information is defamatory, or when a person’s right to intimacy or privacy is violated. Of course, these are rights that are constantly in tension, which is why it’s so important to create spaces for dialogue and engagement, and for solutions to emerge from those spaces for dialogue and engagement.
[As Argentina’s public media ombudsperson], I handled 10,000 cases and never made a decision without hearing both the person who filed the complaint and the person or organization being complained about, and always reaching an agreement on the solution. That’s why no two cases were ever resolved in the same way.
What usually happens is that the other person’s perspective isn’t taken into account. Once people learn about it and listen to it, a sense of empathy and understanding of the situation emerges.
In the vast majority of cases, journalists and communicators want to take the other point of view into account. This is not a matter of opinion or personal taste.
This text was translated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Jorge Valencia
