Portuguese outrage as freedom of the press is attacked

The appointment of former Socialist minister Joaquim Pina Moura as president of Media Capital, the group which owns TVI, the more popular of the two private TV channels in Portugal, fell like a bombshell.

Luís Marques Mendes, leader of the main centre-right opposition party PSD reacted swiftly to the decision taken by Spanish group Prisa, majority shareholder of Media Capital, to appoint the former finance minister to the top job. Marques Mendes accused the ruling Socialist Party of "wanting to take control of everything".

Bearing in mind the alleged links between Prisa and the Spanish Socialist Party, media experts and opinion-makers also expressed reservations.

Criticism of the decision intensified when Pina Moura acknowledged, in an interview last weekend with weekly newspaper Expresso, that his appointment was politically motivated.

The publication of the controversial interview coincided with the announcement that another Socialist heavyweight, José Lemos, would also be on the Media Capital board.

The national media watchdog Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicacão Social (ERC) is now analysing the extent to which ideology could be jeopardising TVI’s independence.

Are we facing a conflict between freedom of the press and controlled information? Is the appointment compatible with the conditions which the channel had to meet to receive its licence?

The answers to these questions are crucial for the ERC itself, which has been fighting to impose its legitimacy since it was created less than two years ago. The present imbroglio could not have come at a worse moment for the government.

Prime Minister José Sócrates’s honeymoon period with the public seems to be over. He is currently under fire over his civil engineer diploma, which was issued by a university recently closed by a ministerial decision for lack of minimum quality standards. The episode has made him question the motivations of newspapers which made the decision public.

And this occurs after the approval of a new television law, backed only by the ruling Socialist Party.

The fierce discussion that the law provoked is a sign of the political establishment’s unease on a touchy subject in a society vulnerable to temptations from political forces to control journalists. All this in a society whose citizens read fewer and fewer newspapers while journalists face increasingly precarious working conditions and are paying the price of market integration in the media sector.

The most ferocious detractors of the new TV law, private operators TVI and SIC, fear that the government will use it as a tool to consolidate the position of the state television by making conditions tougher for renewing emission rights. The law is also supposed to regulate the arrival of digital television in Portugal and new regional channels.

A law regulating journalists’ activity, which was approved recently, also illustrates the troubled relations between the press and the state’s institutions.

The law was described by the country’s journalists’ union as the biggest attack on press freedom since the days of the Salazar dictatorship.

And last year the country found out with dismay about a police raid in the offices of daily tabloid newspaper 24 Horas, which published a list of high-ranking politicians, civil servants and judges whose phone calls had been recorded by judicial order in the context of a sex scandal.

The public outrage was bigger when it became clear that the state prosecutor was keener on punishing journalists, whose computers were confiscated, than on finding out how judges could order the recording of phone calls by Portugal’s president himself.

Just a few months ago, Público, a daily newspaper, was condemned by the Supreme Court for having published facts that, while being true, had damaged the reputation of a football club.

Political scientists and sociologists are now busy trying to answer whether such facts are a serious threat to the democratic nature of a modern European country.

• Alexandra Lobão is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

The appointment of former Socialist minister Joaquim Pina Moura as president of Media Capital, the group which owns TVI, the more popular of the two private TV channels in Portugal, fell like a bombshell.