La visibilidad mediática de actores políticos en la red: La política gestión de contenidos digitales y la propiedad intelectual en España y en el Reino Unido (The Media Visibility of Political Actors on the Net: The Public Policy of Digital Contents Management and Their Intellectual Property in Spain and the United Kingdom)

Abstract

The dissertation deals with the media visibility of the policy actors involved in the public debate about the unauthorized use of copyright contents on the Internet. In a context of mediated politics, the assumption is that the most visible actors in the media debate have a greater chance of capturing public attention and exerting influence in the public opinion. Nevertheless, according to the actors’ profile and their resources, we expected to observe a high variation among actors’ media strategy and their visibility on different media. The study cases are the public debate in response to regulation in United Kingdom with the Digital Economy Act (DEA) and the Spanish case with the Ley de Economia Sostenible (LES). The media visibility is measured on the following media: mainstream media, web sites, search engines, blogs and video sharing services. The research applies different methodological approaches to obtain the data and to triangulate the research findings, including documentary analysis, hyperlink network analysis, analysis of video networks, automatic content analysis and finally interviews with key people from the different actors involved in the conflict. The aim of this research is to identify the actors’ strategy on media and to compare the most visible actors and their messages on multiple media channels. Some of the research findings are an extreme disparity of media visibility among policy actors; the research tries to explain this situation. According to expectations, policy actors' media strategy and their media visibility vary among media channels. A finding of this research is that visibility varies widely from one context to another even when actors show similar profiles. In addition, in both cases there is a strong correlation between the media agenda and the public attention as well as a moderate correlation between visibility on blogs and mainstream media, this correlation is stronger for all actors in the United Kingdom.