For more than half a century the re

For more than half a century the relationship between children and the media has been a subject of concern and study for different areas of knowledge. An important example of the interest on the children-media binary is the work carried out by Spanish universities and national public television companies (Ortiz Sobrino et al., 2013). One of the lines of research developed with particular intensity since the 1980s is the regulation of the media in relation to their potentially harmful effects on children, in the realm of conventional television and the new online services based on internet and mobile technology. In this regard, the EU Kids Online project, led for several years by Sonia Livingstone, has stood out for its intensive work, which specifically addresses the issue of regulation (Livingstone, 2014; Livingstone and Bulger, 2014). Since the 1960s, and especially since the 1980s, this subject has also been addressed by many works of compilation and critical review (Livingstone and Haddon, 2009; Pereira, Pinto and Pereira, 2012; and Lemish, 2015). On the other hand, the analysis of the regulation on the protection of minors from television contents and, in general, on the most appropriate audiovisual policies in this area, has been much more limited in Spain. This lack of scientific literature in the Spanish case is not casual since the concern for minors’ consumption of television is a relatively recent phenomenon that in most cases emerged in the last ten years, except for the case of the autonomous communities of Catalonia and Navarre, where their respective audiovisual councils begun to show concern about this issue a few years earlier. In fact, it was the publication by the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia of the white book on Education in the audiovisual environment (La educación en el entorno audiovisual), in 2003, which marked a turning point in awareness about the impact of television consumption among
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Revista Latina de Comunicación Social # 070 – Pages 468 to 489 Research Funded | DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-2015-1055en | ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2015 http://www.revistalatinacs.org/070/paper/1055/25en.html Página 470 Spanish children and adolescents. The report highlighted the large number of children who watched television during the prime time and late night slots, in which contents and themes inappropriate for their age were broadcast. The information provided by the white book became an important social warning in Spain and forced the Government of President Rodriguez Zapatero to promote an agreement with the most important national television channels, which culminated in the creation of a legislation whose main objective was to implement a TV programme rating system and to reach an agreement with television channels to stop the broadcast of inappropriate content for children from 06:00 to 22:00 hours. That agreement became the “Self-regulation Code on Television Contents and Childhood” (Código de Autorregulación sobre Contenidos de Televisión e Infancia), which was signed on 9 December, 2004, by four large national television operators: RTVE, Antena 3, Telecinco and Sogecable. Two years later, in June 2006, the Code was also signed by the Federation of Regional Radio and Television Corporations (FORTA), Veo, Net TV, and La Sexta. In 2010, the General Law on Audiovisual Communication (hence GLAC), which regulates the Spanish television industry, adopted the contents of the Self-regulation Code and transposed into the Spanish legal system the 2007 European Audiovisual Media Services Directive. In line with this European legislation, the GLAC differentiated between content identified as potentially harmful for children and content not suitable for minors. The former type, whose broadcast is forbidden, includes programmes containing scenes of pornography or gratuitous violence. The second type of content (programmes for adult