The Spanish Public Television under political pressure

EUROPEAN STUDENT THINK TANK

The Coun­cil of Europe recently released a report that warns that polit­ical pres­sure is being put on Span­ish pub­lic tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing (Tele­visión Española, TVE). The report draws atten­tion to sim­ilar situ­ations of polit­ics push­ing broad­cast­ing in Hungary, Romania, Italy, Ser­bia and Ukraine.

It is not the first time that the Coun­cil of Europe – an inter­na­tional organ­iz­a­tion which includes 47 coun­tries around the world and pro­motes demo­cratic val­ues – cri­ti­cizes the way that Span­ish pub­lic tele­vi­sion presents the news. The last time was dur­ing the 2004 legis­la­tion when the Partido Popular (Pop­u­lar Party) – the right-wing Span­ish party – was gov­ern­ing the state.

Nowadays, to become the pres­id­ent of the pub­lic tele­vi­sion, the can­did­ate needs the approval of the major­ity of the Mem­bers of the Span­ish Par­lia­ment. That was an amend­ment put in place by the Pop­u­lar Party in 2012, before then it was neces­sary to gain the approval of two thirds of the Cham­ber. Leo­poldo Gonza­lez Eche­nique is the cur­rent pres­id­ent of TVE, how­ever, he does not have the approval of the offi­cial oppos­i­tion part (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the left-wing party).

In the report, the broad­cast­ing firm referred to is TVE News. Its cur­rent director,Julio Somoano, wrote, inter­est­ingly enough, a thesis in 2005 called Estrategia de comunicación para el triunfo del Partido Popular en las próximas elecciones (Com­mu­nic­a­tion strategy for the vic­tory of the Pop­u­lar Party in the next elections).

This seems like far too many coin­cid­ences for a pub­lic tele­vi­sion net­work that should be an impar­tial and apolit­ical media meant to rep­res­ent all the Span­iards. But the truth is that the Coun­cil of Europe is not the first one to denounce this, TVE has received an increas­ing num­ber of the com­plaints sent by the anonym­ous cit­izens. Some of the more not­able situ­ations of mis­in­form­a­tion were when this tele­vi­sion net­work did not report on the dif­fer­ent ral­lies against the social cut­backs on the 15th of Septem­ber 2012. Another example of blatant mis­in­form­a­tion was when they decided to ignore the 1,5 mil­lion people rally in the streets of Bar­celona claim­ing for the inde­pend­ence of Cata­lonia and slot them in the fifth pos­i­tion (on 11th of Septem­ber 2012).

Spain is in a state of extreme eco­nomic crisis,extreme social crisis, extreme cor­rup­tion and, now, the inter­na­tional organ­isms are aler­ted by pos­sible polit­ical influ­ence in the pub­lic media – you tell me where the good news is.

European Student Think Tank