Spain’s Prime Minister and its media: Information or manipulation?

Date: 05/04/03

The government has too much media power, and misuses it

SPAIN'S conservative prime minister, José María Aznar, has firmly backed the war on Iraq. Most Spaniards are against it. So, even before fighting began, were most of the media, even on the right, and they are still more hostile today. That is horrid news, as opinion polls confirm, for a party due to face a general election within a year, now led by a man who plans not to stand again but who has no chosen heir. And Mr Aznar's reaction has made things worse. He treats his critics, these claim, almost as enemies of the nation, and the media as if they should shut up. Some even claim to smell a whiff of Francoism in the air.

That may be overdoing things. Besides, the opposition is certainly able to get its message across. It savaged Mr Aznar in a recent parliamentary debate on his Iraq policy. And he has a point when he complains that the left treats his People's Party almost as if it were an enemy of democracy.

Still, the charge that Mr Aznar misuses the media, particularly television, has some force. Anti-war demos? The main state television channel handled one big demo by showing a 1950s film; the less popular channel wheeled in pundits to underestimate the number of demonstrators. The public is unconvinced of the horrors of Saddam Hussein's arsenal? Replace the scheduled programme with a documentary on the nastiness of chemical warfare. It has been harder to hide the horrors of war itself, but not hard enough to stop liberals demanding an end to the cynical way Spanish governments - this is not the first - use state media as a political tool.

The state is still a big owner and bigger voice in the media. It appoints the heads of state television, radio and the national news agency, EFE, and its message seeps down to their lowest levels. There is little objectivity in the selection of images on state television or in its blending of news with views. When the authorities, central and local, mishandled the oil spewed on to north-western Spain by a sunken oil tanker last autumn, rather than show the filth, state television preferred pictures of the defence minister, Federico Trillo, in his helicopter above pristine beaches. Some employees of the state network last month set up a “committee against news manipulation” - ie, and they said so, in Mr Aznar's interest.

Before he won power in 1996, Mr Aznar promised to reform the law on state media in the direction of objectivity. It has not happened. In his early years of office, Telefnica, the then state-owned telecoms company, bought up many media outlets, and later brought them on-message. There is little parliamentary scrutiny: an official watchdog on the media, partly peopled by political appointees, is ineffective.

Nor have private channels bitten far into the viewership of state news programmes. The only terrestrial television channel, Telecinco, now out of Mr Aznar's grasp, is in the hands of his friend Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right-wing prime minister. By Spain's limp standards, it has been tolerably objective, and critical when judgment was called for. Thus one Telecinco sketch parodied the type of experts invited on to state television who explained anti-government demonstrations as manifestations of “the Mediterranean desire to be with other people and the need for an evening stroll”. But after Telecinco recently scrapped a popular political satirical programme, Caiga quien caiga (Fall whoever falls), Spaniards wonder how long this relatively happy state of affairs will last.

The press is another matter. The biggest (and deeply serious) news daily, El País, is broadly pro-Socialist; El Mundo, its livelier conservative rival, is against the war and has recently turned against Mr Aznar too. But rather few Spaniards read newspapers, apart from the two big sports dailies - and much of the provincial press anyway depends heavily on EFE reports.

Do not forget the 1980s and 1990s, say conservatives, when Felipe González and his Socialists were in power. In 1986, after he did a U-turn to keep Spain in NATO, the state media were marshalled to crowd out those who were against it. The sycophantic political interview that is so evident on television today was perfected during Mr González's days of power.

Paradoxically, the best days of media freedom came soon after Franco died in 1975, under a conservative government. As Spain headed for democracy, its new prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, had been Franco's director-general of state broadcasting. But the forerunner of Mr Aznar's centre-right People's Party, not wanting to be seen as “old dogs in new collars”, handed control of the state media to the Socialists. It was the left that reverted to Francoist patterns, says Mr Aznar, a charge he made much of in 1996.

Still, there are antidotes: a legion of press columnists, and Spain's free-ranging, private-sector radio, led by such legends as Iñaki Gabilondo and his irreverent morning show on SER, owned by the big Prisa group, owners of EL PAIS. And Mr Aznar could do worse than set the state's media free. If the Socialists win next year's general election, his People's Party will face hostility from the Prisa outlets and the state media too.

Article argues that the Spanish Government has too much media power and uses it.