Transparency and public accountability are two essential aspects of public administrations because they help to prevent possible cases of corruption and encourage citizen participation. In this sense, transparency is a communicative, not merely administrative or legal, process between public institutions and citizens. The main objective of this study is to identify predictive factors of transparency in government healthcare centers in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain in 2021. To do this, we analyzed the websites of 64 public administrations from these countries. Content analysis was applied to assess the presence of 24 indicators on each website. The results for the studied cases reveal an association between the level of transparency and three factors: healthcare systems, internet access, and administration levels. We also identified a predictive factor that should be considered in future studies on the transparency of healthcare websites: the likelihood of decreased transparency was reduced by 91% for public healthcare systems (Ecuador and Spain) as opposed to mixed public –private healthcare systems (Chile and Colombia). We thereby conclude that the involvement of the State, at least in matters related to the healthcare field, favors greater access to information by the community, at the same time as providing greater social responsibility because of substantial communication of the activities carried out by these centers, as well as how and by whom.
Interactivity is a factor on which cyber journalism is based and summarizes participation options between a user and the medium, a user with other users, and a user with editors. In this study, we focus on the latter in three countries—Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador—, which have been identified owing to their technological gap and the emerging importance of online communication for their respective societies. Through 35 in-depth interviews with journalists from these countries, we analyzed the concept of interactivity of these professionals and their relationship with users. The results revealed that the journalists positively valued civic contributions as a space for diagnosis, although they do not perceive its informational value, as they relate them to the context of opinions. These results verify the prevalence of journalism as strongly influenced by conventional offline production routines.
Transparency is a communicative process whose aim is to provide citizens with information that will promote their participation in public affairs. However, its application is often reduced to a legally stipulated administrative act. In contrast, this article sets out the principles, attributes and evidence of transparency from a communication perspective, taking into consideration that transparency is treated as a process through which recipients obtain, understand and use information. This study focuses on the transparency of local town councils, although most of the concepts could be applied at other levels of public administration. To establish this framework, the legislation and application of transparency in three countries (Spain, Ecuador and Colombia) was studied using the Infoparticipa method designed with a communication approach in mind. A comparative study was then carried out using methods designed in other disciplines. Through this approach, the benefits of transparency were categorized to define six principles—disclosure, strengthening, visibility, comprehensibility, dissemination and humanism—and eight attributes of transparent information: veracity, timeliness, accessibility, usability, intelligibility, universality, pluralism and plurality. For each attribute, the evidence of its application was determined. This framework clarifies the perspective of transparency for participation from a communication approach.
The constant demands of citizens to be informed in real time have made Twitter an ideal tool for mass use. This social network has originated a new user of social communication, and is used to present public images and appeal to the population, at the same time that it is displacing the pre-eminence of traditional communication media. During the national strike in Ecuador in October 2019, alternative and conventional media used this platform to inform, generate debate, carry out calls and mobilizations, and position perspectives. This study analyzes the tweets and hashtags published on the most viral days of the strike. A mixed methodology was applied, i.e., qualitative and quantitative. The techniques applied were discourse analysis and the systematic review of each hashtag. The sample was taken from the hashtags published by traditional and alternative media from October 3 to 13. As the main result, it was concluded that the published hashtags had a high impact on informing users and, to a certain extent, on the calls that were made.
The objective of this research is to analyze the role of two different digital media in the message development for care of the environment in Ecuador in the context of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP 26). To address this qualitative research, we worked on a comparison of contents, complemented with text analysis and interviews with experts related to protecting the environment and journalists who generated content on this topic. In one case, the journalistic coverage had limitations, and, in the other, some superficial issues were addressed. In both cases, the wording was relatively complex, and each medium adapted the news to its ideological bias. It is necessary to change how journalism has been built; in other words, we need to “build” environmental journalism in Ecuador. Independent spaces for analysis, specialized personnel in topics related to this area, and professional training processes, research, and dissemination of content to raise citizens’ awareness of environmental issues are required.
Comunicación, política y desarrollo aborda una variedad de objetos de estudio, enfoques y metodologías utilizadas en el campo de los estudios de la comunicación en nuestra región. Las propuestas pretenden incorporar nuevos enfoques provenientes de múltiples disciplinas asociados a la comunicación desde una perspectiva crítica. A la vez, este compilado busca entender la comunicación no de manera instrumental, sino como un proceso complejo de significación social e interacción, con implicaciones políticas, tecnológicas, sociales y culturales. En este sentido, la Serie Estudios de la Comunicación, de la cual este libro es parte, busca fomentar la discusión, el debate y la producción científica desde diferentes ángulos o perspectivas, que conlleven a la resolución de problemas a través de la investigación aplicada o el desarrollo de ensayos teóricos que fortalezcan investigaciones de comunicación desde perspectivas transdisciplinarias.
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