05/14/2020 20:26
The
Parliamentary Bureau accepted, after denying it in its previous session, that
the parliamentary control committee of the Catalan Audiovisual Media
Corporation (CCMA) meet, virtually, on Friday, May 22. This meeting had been
strongly demanded by both the opposition groups and by the representatives of
the Union of Journalists of Catalonia (SPC) in TV3 after over the last few
weeks criticism of the public media of the Generalitat has increased for its
way of operating and informing.
Last Wednesday the TV3
Professional Council on News and the Professional Council of Catalonia Radio
published a statement in which they expressed their complaint about the use
made of the news programs from both media to broadcast messages and
interventions by the president of the Generalitat and of the councilors of the
Government. This statement, which insisted on the complaint that had already
been issued in a previous one, was titled “Let de-confine ourselves …
also informatively”. The TV3 News Council had complained in the first
statement that institutional activity “was colonizing” the news
programs on the network.
In the statement, it is regretted that “it
cannot be that over the weekend, the presence of direct political leaders in
our antennas will eventually exceed the rest of the information”. TV3 and
channel 3/24 unified their programming after the state of alarm was declared
and a large part of the workers of the CCMA went to work in confinement. When
the de-confinement process is taking place, the professional councils of public
television and radio consider that it is also necessary to “recover the TV news
to the information valued and treated with the criteria of the newsrooms of TV3
and Catalunya Ràdio ”.
The director of TV3, Vicent
Sanchis, and the acting president of the CCMA, Nuria Llorach, will also have to
give explanations of the repeated insults and political positions taken on
social networks by various presenters and regular commentators on the station.
In recent weeks, the non-convening of the CCMA control commission has meant
that these attitudes did not even have the counterpoint of the parliamentary
complaint by opposition groups.
Toni Soler, from the Està Pasant program, and
Pilar Rahola, an almost daily talk show guest, have intervened in the Badalona
municipal crisis to criticize both the PSC and the PP. Rahola said live on TV3
that the new mayor of Badalona, the PP Xavier García Albiol, is
“slimy”. Pere Mas, deputy director of the FAQs program published a
tweet where he implied that the crisis was due to the fact that Badalona is a
city that has nothing more to give and another where he compared Spain with
Turkey when commenting on a report by Amnesty International of Catalonia
against the imprisonment of Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart.
Sanchis and Llorach will also have to argue as
explained that, according to the latest report from the Catalan Audiovisual
Council, four pro-independence guests are interviewed on TV3 for each political
or social leader who is not. It is fair to say that not all TV3 workers
subscribe to the criticism issued by their professional council. Xavier Valls,
sports writer, wrote on Twitter: “I like that the professional advice of
TV3 is critical and defends the independence of journalists, but you should not
give ammunition to those who cannot bear to have the truth explained.”
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