The doctoral thesis

The question

The question guiding the research is this:

How can public service media help reduce ableist stereotypes through the representation and presence of people with disabilities?

Why public service media

Until now, research on media and disability has focused mainly on technical accessibility and on style guides. The presence and representation of people with disabilities have been studied far less, and in Spain there are no specific studies on the obligations of public service media towards disability.

Public service media have more obligations than private media: they must reflect the diversity of society. UNESCO (2025) calls on them to increase the presence of people with disabilities, to represent them free of stereotypes and to manage them inclusively.

The cases

I study three public broadcasting corporations:

• RTVE, the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation, because of its nationwide reach and because it has developed the right of access through its own regulations.
• CCMA, the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation, and EITB, Basque Radio and Television, because of their history, their workforce, their range of channels and services and their audience.

I also analyse the fact-checking services of RTVE, CCMA and the EFE news agency (EFE Verifica), to see how they deal with disinformation about disability. The fieldwork takes place between autumn 2026 and the first half of 2027.

Objectives

The main objective is to analyse how public service media can help reduce ableist stereotypes through the representation and presence of people with disabilities, within the framework of their public service remit. To do so, the thesis aims to:

1. Identify the public service obligations of RTVE, CCMA and EITB regarding the representation of, and access for, people with disabilities.
2. Assess whether these obligations are met, especially regarding the participation of people with disabilities in managing the media and producing content.
3. Analyse how disability is represented in content and identify ableist stereotypes.
4. Examine the mechanisms the media have to ensure non-ableist representation, and assess how effective they are.
5. Propose a framework of good practice for inclusive, stereotype-free representation.
6. Determine whether disability is a theme in the work of fact-checking services.
7. Investigate how disability is represented in disinformation narratives.

How I research it

I use a qualitative methodology with three techniques:

• Document analysis of the academic literature; of treaties, laws and regulations at five levels (international, European, Spanish, Catalan and Basque); and of reports by regulators, observatories and the media themselves.
• In-depth interviews with people responsible for public service media and their fact-checking services, regulators, organisations that promote diversity and organisations of people with disabilities.
• Content analysis, based on critical discourse analysis, of in-house fiction and of the content published by fact-checking services.

First findings

The first findings, on RTVE, suggest that the rules treat people with disabilities mainly as an audience. Content accessibility is backed by quotas and monitoring, but presence and stereotype-free representation remain principles, with no indicators to verify whether they are met.

These are preliminary findings. The research continues with CCMA and EITB.

Theoretical framework

The thesis rests on three pillars:

• Disability studies, with my own classification of the models for interpreting disability.
• Media and disability studies, with a review of the state of the art based on 79 academic articles and 38 other works.
• Public service media theory, in which diversity is a core value and the right of access guarantees part of it.

Timeline

• 2024-2025 academic year: start of the PhD.
• October 2024: collaboration agreement between the UAB and Fundación ONCE.
• 2025: the thesis becomes an industrial doctorate.
• 2025-2026: theoretical framework.
• Autumn 2026: in-depth interviews.
• 2027: content analysis and an international research stay.

The industrial doctorate

This thesis is part of the Government of Catalonia’s Industrial Doctorates Plan, which supports research carried out jointly by a university and a company or organisation. In this case, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Fundación ONCE. You can see the project’s page on the Industrial Doctorates website.

• Supervisor: Dr Mercè Díez Jiménez (UAB).
• Academic tutor: Dr Isabel Fernández Alonso (UAB).
• Tutor at Fundación ONCE: Dr Lourdes González Perea.

Why “people with disabilities”

My Master’s thesis used the Catalan term diversitat funcional (functional diversity). In the thesis I use “people with disabilities”, the term used by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, consistent with the legal framework and with the disability movement, and aligned with the Nordic relational model. “Functional diversity” has been criticised for not moving beyond the assumptions of the medical model. It is a choice that depends on context, and the thesis explains the reasons for it.

References

UNESCO. (2025). Igualdad para las personas con discapacidad en los medios: Representación | Accesibilidad | Gestión. UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.58338/GSVF7613