By Juan S. Larrosa-Fuentes (August 10, 2026)
In recent days, an interesting discussion has taken place in Mexico regarding audience rights, following the publication of new guidelines intended to guarantee them. Much of the commentary published in the media and on digital platforms has been critical, particularly regarding freedom of expression. For its part, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT) and President Claudia Sheinbaum have defended these guidelines during her morning press conference.
Rather than adding to this discussion, which I believe has become highly politicized and polarized, I would like to approach the issue from another perspective.
Public information and the conditions necessary to guarantee a minimum level of democratic functioning are highly relevant issues for our democratic life. In recent years, we have seen electoral processes affected by epistemic dysfunctions such as misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and what are commonly called fake news.
This is not a new problem. For decades, there has been debate about the responsibilities media organizations have regarding the content they disseminate and the limits that may be established, for example, to protect children or to deal with particularly sensitive information. In other words, there is a problem that democratic societies need to address.
But there is also a fundamental difficulty: the state cannot simply be the one deciding what information may circulate and what may not. Doing so poses clear risks to freedom of expression and theright to information.
And this brings us back to the Mexican case. Audience rights and audience ombuds offices already existed. Their performance has been deficient, and broadcasters themselves have not always given them the importance they require. Self-regulation, moreover, has limitations that have been extensively documented in the academic literature.
However, I see another, even more important problem: we are having an anachronistic discussion. Audience rights were an essential topic of debate during the 1980s and 1990s, when radio and television occupied a central position in the communication system. But the information ecosystem has changed radically. As I noted in my previous commentary, recent data from the Reuters Institute show that fewer and fewer people get their news through television, radio, and the press, while digital platforms are becoming increasingly important. And in this new ecosystem there are no “audiences” in the traditional sense; there are people who consume and reuse information in highly complex ways.
That is why it is insufficient to discuss audience rights while thinking exclusively about radio and television. Today, we should be asking how to guarantee a better circulation of public information in an ecosystem involving traditional media, digital platforms, social networks, journalists, content creators, and transnational technology companies. And, of course, we must do so while guaranteeing freedom of expression.
This should be a long-term debate of national importance. Unfortunately, the government and the opposition seem to be turning it once again into a dispute driven by immediate political circumstances. The risk is that we end up discussing only whether these guidelines constitute an attempt at censorship and lose the opportunity to address a much larger problem: what kind of public communication system do we need to confront the information dysfunctions of our time and strengthen our democracy?