“Come, climb the stairs so that you can be seen on camera, since you already know that what does not appear on TV is as if it were not”, encouraged the actress Patricia Vázquez to the attendees as the queue of the demonstration He was arriving at the Praza de Praterías, the secular stage, next to the cathedral of Santiago, in which the “manifesto in defense of the CRTVG (Radio Television Corporation of Galicia)” was about to be read. That precisely, among other issues such as reprisals against workers and precariousness, was the cause of the protest called by the Intercentros Committee and 40 other social, cultural, trade union and political groups for this Sunday in Compostela: what does not appear on TV , doesn’t exist, so it’s easy to silence what doesn’t matter or isn’t convenient.
This massive march of personnel from the public entity (which is not the first) has come after 233 “Black Fridays”, the name with which the Galician regional radio and television staff baptized the indoor mobilizations in 2018. With them they express their discomfort at the pressure and information manipulation suffered at home by the Government of Galicia, in the hands of the PP since 2009. In the words of the committee, the fight is against the “kidnapping” of the public media by the Xunta. And against a leadership “at the service of the PP”, which “puts the interests of the party before the values of an ethical-political nature on which public service must be based, related to the democratic, social and cultural needs” of the people.
It was Alberto Núñez Feijóo, as they recalled this Sunday in the manifesto read by journalists Ana Romaní and Manuel Pampín, who “13 years ago appointed the CEO by hand”, Alfonso Sánchez Izquierdo, who perpetuates himself. And it was also the Government of Feijóo, two years later, that promoted the public media law that dictated that this position should be appointed by a qualified majority [dos tercios, que el PP no alcanza por ocho escaños] in the Parliament of Galicia; although an amendment by the same group, in 2015, paved the way for the permanence of Sánchez Izquierdo. But at the end of the demonstration, supported by the two opposition formations represented in the Chamber (BNG and PSdeG), Pampín, a veteran news presenter, wanted to launch a general notice: “I have been a journalist for Radio Televisión de Galicia for a long time. 37 years… The CRTVG cannot be an exchange of trading cards between political parties. Whoever governs, must be an example of honesty, plurality and truthfulness”.
The CRTVG accumulates in recent years a trail of sentences for violating fundamental and labor rights of its staff. This demonstration comes after the High Court of Justice of Galicia confirmed this summer a ruling in favor of the journalist Carlos Jiménez, filed and sanctioned for his support of the black veins and his participation in protest acts of the Defend Galega movement. Last week, the company committee denounced in a statement that several union centrals had received “warnings” from the human resources department in which they identified certain workers for pasting posters of the demonstration at the corporation’s headquarters in San Marcos. (Santiago). With such an atmosphere of the previous days, this noon the presenters of the act (Romaní, Pampín and the actors Patricia Vázquez and Federico Pérez) have thanked the attendees for daring to attend the protest “without fear of reprisals”.
The march went through the center of the Galician capital while the throats chanted slogans addressed to the new president of the Xunta: “Roll, pay attention, TV is not for sale”, “Galician TV is not Alfonso Rueda’s” or “Flat tire, like this nothing is done”. And the banners cried out against the informative “manipulation” or the “helplessness” of the workforce: “For a CRTVG at the service of the people, let’s rescue La Galega”, “Sexist content, out of our sight”. The manifesto read later in the heart of Compostela emphasized the urgent need to create a news council, provided for by the 2011 law, as an internal body for the participation of professionals to ensure “independence, neutrality, pluralism, veracity and objectivity of the contents.
“We believe that Galician society must come to the rescue of our public service of audiovisual communication and we express our firm will to defend the existence of a public radio and television”, pronounced from the stage, before the protesters and curious pilgrims, the presenters Romaní and Pampín . The CRTVG must be a public service, they explained below, that “eradicates the manipulation and cancellation of content and professionals”; that it “recovers territorial coverage and local disconnections”; that “defend the identity of Galicia, its language and its culture”; and that “recovers the perspective of the social, labor, economic and cultural reality”, without being able to exclude “any social group and with the utmost respect for pluralism and the democratic participation of the entire Galician society”.
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