Laura Martínez Aguila is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB) in Brazil. Prior to this, she served as an Audience Ombudsperson at the Mexican Institute of Radio (IMER) from 2020 to 2025. Currently, Laura is Head of the Research Committee at the Mexican Association of Audience Defenders (AMDA) and Vice-Coordinator of Working Group 18: Ethics, Freedom of Expression, and the Right to Communication at the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC). She is a graduate in political communication and holds a master’s degree in communication from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Can you tell us about your PhD project?
My dissertation project is a comparative research focused on both structural similarities and differences between the two main PSM in Mexico and Brazil: The Mexican State’s Broadcasting System (Sistema de Radiodifusión del Estado Mexicano, SPR) and the Brazilian Enterprise of Communication (Empresa Brasil de Comunicação, EBC). By analyzing the structural conditions that created those PSM, such as federal laws, broadcasting regulations, ethical codes, internal regulations, and the designation criteria for the board of directors, as well as mechanisms for citizen participation (e.g. ombudspersons and citizen councils), I aim to identify any gaps in coherence or contradictions that arise when these structural conditions institutionalize the PSM. I also aim to explore how the sense of ‘public’ evolves within certain political contexts (whether left- or right-wing) in the face of intentional interventions in those PSM. What are the effects of such political interventions? How does it affect the comprehension of what public communication means to society? What are the consequences for democracy in the 21st Century, when it continues to exclude us from this process of communication, once we understand those structural factors? Hopefully, I will receive a few responses.
You have been working as an ombudsperson (defensora de audiencias) for Mexican public radio IMER for five years. In how far did this experience motivate your research? Which challenges did you meet as defensora?
Being defensora de audiencias influenced my perspective completely for my current research. Previously, for my undergraduate and masters, I was concerned with the relevance of defensorias, their role in promoting social participation of audiences for the practice of certain communicational rights, to build layers of citizenship, simultaneously attached to the category of audience. However, that proved to be very idealistic once data confronted reality. As a defensora,I dealt with the very low engagement from the audiences and little knowledge and/or comprehension of their rights, vertical decisions that would neither take the audiences into consideration, nor would provide fully satisfactory, transparent explanations; let alone the lack of a strong institutional infrastructure to provide autonomy, support and legitimacy to the defensoria. Therefore, I shifted my focus. What truly mattered wasn’t the defensoria itself, but rather, the context of how public media is institutionalized and perceived by society. As if that weren’t enough, I observed certain practices of the then-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro – a far-right politician – that closely mimicked the behavior of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador – a so-called leftist – including attacks on public media, journalists, and media outlets in general. That’s when I thought I had an object of research far more complex, than the anecdote.
How can your research contribute to the study of Public Service Media?
Perhaps this is too much pretension, nonetheless qualitative comparative research is not that common for communication studies in Latin America. We know only little about PSM in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua or Bolivia, so I hope my research can contribute with an instrument for categorization of structural conditions with a glimpse of two PSM, in two important countries. The hope is to show that there are structural and systemic shared conditions that shape our PSM in the Latin American region. For such reason, there are possibilities of conjoint analysis, of integrated work and solutions for similar problems. A problem that, at the very core, is about how communication, the definition of the public and democracy are interlinked. When it comes to Public Service Media, researchers seem to deal with isolated cases or very specific indicators, as if PSM were always unique and inherently “good guys” or “victims”in comparison with media outlets of commercial ownership, rather than part of wide, systemic and structural practices that repeat themselves and are strongly linked to the configuration of political power, that may even use the public space for propaganda. Such perspectives risk neutralising the fact of how state property, that shapes PSM, is also a monopoly.
Is there any (emerging or senior) scholar that has particularly impacted your work in any way? Who and why?
There are several. First of all, Jacques Rancière: His concept of politics and conflict, reshaping the established order of things is defining for everything I’ve done and how I understand PSM. However, I’ll mention the most senior of them all, Jesús Martín-Barbero: to reverse the generalized thinking of the effects of the media and, instead, focus on the practices of the people and what we do with the media. In an era when we are again discussing simplistic arguments such as “AI is the new manipulation of the masses”, I continue to find that idea very important and revolutionary. At the International Radio Biennial in Mexico City in 2012, Barbero’s words stood out to me during this conference, when he said: “When everybody was looking up North (referring to the US and Europe), I decided to look to the South”. Probably, I took that metaphor very strongly, for I moved below the equator with the curiosity of wanting to find out what happens when we don’t follow the noise of shallow changes in trend, and slightly pay attention to something apparently static, supposedly already explained, only to see it now in a different light.