Two problematics: art and industry

In its coverage of the newly elected Socialist government's plans for the future (published on March 21, 2004), El País called attention to the “reforma y saneamiento” (“reform and cleaning up”) of television as a priority. Under the heading “¿El fin de la televisión de partido?” (“The End of Party Political Television?”), Rosario G. Gómez reported that President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had announced that not one more euro would be given from public funds for “la manipulación y la programación basura” (“manipulation and trash programming”). El País offers an apocalyptic sketch of the current state of public broadcasting in Spain:

The Socialists proposed a new Statute for RTVE (aiming to bring back truth, plurality, and objectivity in the media) and the creation of a Consejo de Medios Audiovisuales (“Council of Audiovisual Media”). The founding membership was given as: Academician Emilio Lledó; the philosophers Victoria Camps (a vitriolic critic of telebasura in the pages of El País) and Fernando Savater; Media Studies professor Enrique Bustamante; and the veteran linguist and Academician Fernando Lázaro Carreter, who was to die before the Council met.

The contradictions in the Socialists’ policy are clear. How can the new government's threat to withhold funding from specific content fit with its commitment to plurality and independence? And how can the literary and philosophic skills of the new “Committee of Wise Men” (as it was soon dubbed) address economic and technical problems such as TVE's burden of debt and declining audience? The composition of the Council could hardly have been further from that of the Spanish TV audience and it contained only one specialist in the field.