The discomfort shown this week in Congress by Pedro Sánchez when asked by Alberto Núñez Feijóo about Moncloa’s maneuvers about the Prisa group -there are two days after the letter of the brand new president of ‘El País’, Joseph Oughourlian, in that … Diario who warned the president of the Government about the desire for control over his company, reaching him surreptitiously with Francisco Franco- has not gone unnoticed for anyone in political and media power centers. For the first time in three years of parliamentary duels, the opposition leader managed to put him in a hurry in the hemicycle, something that brings out several readings about the attitude of the Executive.
The first, that the silence of the president in parliamentary headquarters gives wings to those who denounce their interference in one of the main communication groups in Spain. A term that even that group has given nature letter. The second, that there is no closed defense in public of the former head of the Presidency Cabinet and today Minister of Digital Transformation, in addition to a new leader of the PSOE of Madrid, Óscar López, in the eye of the hurricane of the controversy for his recent meeting in Paris with the president of Telefónica, Marc Murtra, and with the CEO of Vivendi, Arnaud Puyfontaine, with the alleged intention, according to a French newspaper Hand on the hurry council, where the French telecommunications company has an important shareholding package.
López himself has denied any maneuver in that sense bluntly, describing as “bully” what is published and attending that, as responsible for his portfolio, he usually meets with managers from different media companies. And from Moncloa the outrage is maximum with Feijóo for having taken this issue to the weekly control session to the Executive, ignoring key issues of today such as the war in Ukraine, the increase in defense spending that this week has been discussed in the European Council or the decree approved on Tuesday by the Council of Ministers to reform the Law of Foreigners and distribute among the different autonomous communities Unaccompanied immigrants who remain since last year in the Canary Islands.
Zapatero’s influence
But the Popular Party (PP) offensive is not over, since its parliamentary group has already requested the appearance in the lower house of both López and the president of Telefónica. The designation of Murtra replacing José María Álvarez-Pallete is leading to appointments in the company of clear socialist inspiration, in which the hand of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is guessed, whose influence on Moncloa is a certainty since at least two years ago. The former president of the Government assumed the appointment of Murtra as something attributable to the PSOE in the recent Congress of the Socialists of Madrid held a month ago in Leganés, precisely the regional conclave that raised López as the new leader of the Federation replacing Senator Juan Lobato. Shortly after, earlier this month, the appointment was produced as the new president of Movistar + of Javier de Paz. This old acquaintance of the fans is a man of the absolute confidence of Zapatero and of close connection to the PSOE, whose youth led in the eighties after a fleeting passage through the Faculty of Law, where he did not exceed the first course. Its power over the contents of the platform that a large number of Spaniards have in their homes, attracted both by the combined supply of ADSL and for sports and fiction content, is one more clue about the audiovisual plans of Moncloa and Ferraz. Or rather because of the obsession, according to it is increasingly strong in the field of the PSOE, for having related channels, convinced as they are that the current panorama of the audiovisual media is very clearly inclined to the right.
Although against what might seem at first glance, this strategy does not have so much to do with the current government performance, where Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) exercises an important counterweight, and has faces a new stage with a board of directors chosen for the first time without the consensus of the opposition, thanks to a reduction of the majorities for their promoted election, precisely by Minister López, and that has sitting in that organ of control to people as close to people. of the press of the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, a person lacking experience in the media. No, what Sánchez could have in mind, rather, is to face an eventual next future of the PSOE in the opposition to a right government, possibly coalition between the PP and Vox, as not tired of denouncing the socialist leader. Given that scenario, the internal psyche of Sánchez, a leader deeply marked by his political banishment of 2016, when he was forced to leave the General Secretariat of the Party, which he returned a year later after defeating Susana Díaz in the primaries, plays an essential role. On that occasion, like him and several of his collaborators have reported all these years, he saw himself alone, very alone, also in the media field. Even by ideologically close means. And the claim now is not to repeat that experience, what opens the door, on the other hand, that Sánchez, if future elections dislodge him from power, does not abandon at least the command post in Ferraz. In that context it is where the initiative of a new television that was going to promote has been promoted and that Oughourlian aborted unexpectedly and for a striking procedure. He had to go to ‘Expansión’, the Salmon newspaper of the competition (Hurry edits ‘five days’) to indicate the economic unfeasibility of the project and even the obsolescence of putting into circulation a TDT channel in a moment of strong change in the modes of television consumption. The traditional television loses followers in the young segments of the population, while they remain more faithful to it those of the retirees, where the PSOE has a good part of its electoral barn, as well as the PP. In the project he worked with special intensity as director of Hurry Content, José Miguel Contreras, another old acquaintance of the fans, a person very close to Zapatero and founder during his mandate of La Sexta, in addition to Sánchez’s advisor.
In parallel to all this, and as if it were a more contingency plan, the PSOE Communication Department, with Ion Antolín, has undertaken its own audiovisual project, PSOEPlay. An initiative that seems inspired by the thesis of the former leader of Podemos and former government president of the Government, Pablo Iglesias, that political parties have an important audiovisual leg. Ferraz’s press room has been removed in recent weeks until it almost becomes a television set to use. There the press conferences of the federal executive spokeswoman, Esther Peña, are now illustrated with background images and graphics, as if it were a television space. And that is where a weekly program, red zone, which is broadcast through YouTube and where ministers interviewed (the last Lopez and the head of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares) and where some emerging figures of the party, such as the councilor for Madrid Enma López, already have fixed sections dedicated to defending socialist management, are recorded.
The government is convinced that the media front that observes against it is even more effective than that of the political opposition, and works to reverse that situation. Although along the way, the stumbling block of an important media entrepreneur seems to have been found.
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