The government increased its presence on TVE during the State of Alarm
The Government increased its presence in the news programmes of Televisión Española during the first half of 2020, a period marked by the outbreak of the coronavirus. Specifically, the Executive increased its presence by 18.1 percentage points, from 28.6% to 46.7% of the screen share, according to the report on the fulfilment of public service obligations by CRTVE prepared by the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC).
If the interventions of the parties that make up the government -PSOE and Unidas Podemos- are included in this figure, the figure rises to 56.2% (with 6.7% for the former and 2.8% for the latter). In this six-month period, the Partido Popular accounted for one fifth of the political interventions broadcast by TVE (21%), 3.1 percentage points more than in December 2019.
The third party with the greatest television presence on the public channel was Ciudadanos, with 6% (2.2 points less than at the end of the previous year) and Vox accounted for 5.1%, practically at the same threshold as in December 2021 (5.4%).
The rest of the parties accounted for 11.6% of the political interventions, with a predominance of Grupo Plural -Junts Per Catalunya, Más País, Compromís and BNG-, with 4.7% and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, with 3.8%.
The government coalition and Ciudadanos had more presence on TVE than what would correspond to them in terms of parliamentary representation.
The governing coalition scored more minutes of screen time on the public channel than they would be entitled to, if the proportional rule of parliamentary representation is followed. Both left-wing parties obtained 44.3% of the seats (120) and 56.2% of visibility. The same is true of Ciudadanos, which obtained 2.9% of the seats, while TVE gave it 6% of attention, twice as much.
The political formations that have a symmetry between their presence on TVE and their level of parliamentary representation are Grupo Plural, with a margin of imbalance of 1.3 points, and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, with 0.1.
Vox, Partido Popular and the minority parties are the only formations under-represented by public television, if we look at the representation made up in the elections of 10-N 2019. The greatest contrast is presented by Vox, the party that obtained 14.9% of the seats in Congress, which TVE translates into 5.1% of television exposure, i.e. 9.8 points less. It is followed by the PP with a 4.4 point margin and, lastly, the minority parties, with 2.3 points.
Spaniards, who each pay 1.65 euros per month for RTVE, continue to show reticence about the way in which the public corporation reflects all the forces according to their parliamentary representation.
Four out of ten citizens (39.6%) acknowledge that they have little or no agreement that the television broadcaster achieves an adequate proportionality. According to the CNMC report, 26% say they neither agree nor disagree and 2 out of 10 approve of this statement.
