Media Policy Silence en los territorios despoblados: La comunicación en la normativa autonómica y nacional sobre despoblación

Abstract

Through an analytical review of national and regional regulations on the demographic challenge, an exploratory study is carried out to detect the place of communication and the media in these public policies. It is observed that the presence of the communicative aspect is important in the corpus of regulations analysed, which has had its main development since 2017, coinciding with the growing presence of the issue in the media. The standards and strategies refer to the media as accomplices in the achievement of the objectives, highlight the need to promote and protect local media, propose specialisation in journalism professionals and raise awareness of the benefits of the rural environment. However, so far there are no specific measures aimed at the communication and protection of local media in depopulated areas, which some authors have conceptualised as media policy silence. This context represents an opportunity to design innovative strategies in which the media are not considered as mere transmission channels, but as fundamental actors and as part of the intangible values that favour the rootedness to the territory.