Journalism and social responsibility: the paradigm of the news coverage of violence against women

Abstract

Communication is a good, a fundamental human right sanctioned by the Universal Human Rights Declaration and the Spanish Constitution. All human beings, by the fact of being so, have a right to express, communicate or freely receive truthful information from any news medium. Communicative activity is performed by people that act with a collective delegation from society, and the exercise of this activity is subject to ethical demands, established habitually through auto regulatory mechanisms. These duties are more important in the case of the relevant themes for the public opinion, either by their severity, extent or generating concern among citizens, as in the case of the violence against women. The object of this paper is to analyze the development of research on this topic in the media in Spain, the status quo of this treatment today, and the effect of the extensive regulation developed in this case, focusing on the codes of ethics involved in this task.