What is public radio and television for?

A public radio and television station is like a New Year's resolution: each newly formed government says yes this time, avui yes it plays, contrary to what Pujol said. We will eat healthy, we will lose a few kilos, we will join a gym, we will change the gintonics for soft drinks, we will go to bed earlier and we will not argue with tweeters. All of this shines every January 1st, but before the winter ends we give up our efforts to improve: we chain a couple of hangovers, we look with shame at the membership card of that gym that we only step on once and we get into a crossroads. insults with an anonymous tweeter who may be a thirteen-year-old kid.

The governments also propose at the beginning to make RTVE that figurehead of public service that illuminates Spanish society with ideals of quality, exquisiteness, independence, rigor, plurality and many other abstract nouns that dissolve in the lumps of the concrete. A couple of parliamentary sessions and half a fight are usually enough for good intentions to go awry. No party has ever resisted the temptation to use public radio and television for its propaganda strategies.

Neither the citizens who pay for it nor the workers who carry out the programming and try to honor their public service mission deserve this paralysis. The issue is not Broncano's contract or who is right on the board or what ideological bias convinces us most. A debate is urgently needed about what we Spaniards want RTVE to be. The longer you put it off, the harder it will be to untangle the mess. It is urgent to decide if we want a RTVE that competes with private groups or that goes its own way, with programming without commercial servitudes that gives voice and space to all those voices and spaces that are not competitive and are not going to appear on other screens. It is urgent to decide if we want a political commissariat at the head of the editorial line or an independent direction governed by professional criteria and shielded from political interference. It is urgent to decide because RTVE today is one thing and its opposite: magnificent projects of cultural dissemination and plurality coexist with efforts of banal commercialism. There is no defined model with a consensus that governments respect and assume, and creating that model is a task that transcends the situation and the fight between parties. The debate is urgent, and since it is urgent, I suspect that it will never happen.

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