Challenges to public service news programmes in Spain: Professionals and viewers’ discourses wavering between institutional reform and counter-reform

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study analysing the perceptions held by both Spanish public service television (TVE) news professionals and viewers as regards the main challenges faced by Spanish public service broadcasting (PSB), some of which are also common to European PSB. The global changes of the last decade have created a new social, economic, political and technological context to which PBS channels must adapt. Achieving the pluralism demanded by public institutions, differentiating themselves from commercial channels and forging a closer relationship with their audiences are three of the chief hurdles that must be overcome. PSB channels in the Mediterranean region are faced with a further obstacle: maintaining their independence from government, an issue that has led TVE to implement a number of reforms and counter-reforms in the period from 2006–2012. Regarded as a symbol of the public service duty of state-owned broadcasters, news programmes are central to achieving these goals. Therefore, this work intends to contribute to a research agenda, linking audience research to production studies and analysing the broader media policy context (Livingstone, 1998: 2–5), by approaching the complex dynamics between communication policies and specific interpretations of media discourses in Europe. In the case of Spain, this analysis shows that in the period from 2006–2011, PSB news professionals highly valued their new-found independence. However, the seemingly modest increase in viewers’ support does not bode well for the healthy development of PSB in Spain in a scenario in which institutional support is weak.

Keywords

Television news TVE professionals viewers Spain Europe public service broadcasting (PSB)

Introduction

Public service broadcasters need to justify their social value by offering – and demonstrating that they are offering – an essential public service (Bustamante, 2004; Mansell, 2012). This involves, at the very least, three fundamental challenges facing both public broadcasting corporations as a whole and, in particular, their news services: achieving the pluralism demanded by public institutions; differentiating themselves from commercial channels; and forging a closer relationship with their audiences, an objective in which adapting to the new technological environment plays a fundamental role. In addition, whether public service broadcasting (PSB) news programmes are sufficiently independent from government still remains a relevant issue for southern European countries like Spain. This article deals with the perceptions held by Spanish PSB news professionals and viewers of the four above-mentioned issues. A further common obstacle that European PSB will probably have to overcome has to do with the current cuts in public expenditure; an issue that is not addressed here due to the fact that the research fieldwork was conducted before they were announced.

The European PSB model is closely linked to the idea of the welfare state that arose after World War II and whose aim was to protect the general population from the hardships brought about by ill health or unemployment, as well as ensuring equal access to education, culture, and information (Bustamante et al., 2008: 83). The welfare state is currently experiencing a crisis, which dates back several decades (Habermas and Jacobs, 1986) and which has become more pronounced in the last five years (Harvey, 2010; Torres and Garzón, 2010). It is against this background that European PSB is obliged to redouble its efforts to justify its social value. As Jakubowicz (2010: 9) states, following an initial monopolistic period lasting until the mid-1980s, and a second phase in which PSB had to adapt to competition from private channels, we are currently entering a third phase in which PSB must find its place in a multi-channel and multi-screen ecosystem in which audiences are fragmented and the differences between public and private television are becoming less important as a result of a tendency towards a more commercial style of television; all this taking place at a time of global economic and social crisis. In this context, furthermore, the media policies developed by the European Union in the form of successive Television Without Frontiers Directives, now referred to as Audiovisual Media Services, tend to be based on the economic premise (Bustamante et al., 2008: 96) that the existence of public service broadcasters should not, as far as possible, adversely affect the commercial interests of private operators in a single television market (Díaz Arias, 2011; Donders and Pauwels, 2008; Mansell, 2012).

Given this situation, Spanish PSB faces enormous hurdles. First of all, those specific to TVE, the object of this study, will be covered, followed by those shared with other European PSB corporations.

Specific challenges faced by TVE: About independence and other recent reforms in media policy

The Spanish PSB Corporation Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE) has had a tradition of political interference. The media models of Hallin and Mancini (2004) already associated southern European public television broadcasters with government dependency, while ascribing a more established tradition of governmental independence to public television in north-western Europe (see also Lowe and Steemers, 2012: 1).

This interference by successive Spanish governments was what Bustamante (2006: 259) was referring to when he stated that ‘Spanish public television is the weak point of Spanish democracy.’ Bustamante, a leading Spanish academic in the field of communication studies, was a member of the so-called Committee of Experts (Consejo de Sabios), which, at the request of the then recently elected Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, conducted an intensive and rigorous research into RTVE within the context of European public television, the result of which was the State-Owned Media Reform Report (2005) (Informe para la Reforma de los Medios de Titularidad Estatal). This was intended to address the democratic deficit that became part of the public agenda when the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional) found TVE guilty of manipulation in 2003. In 2004, the Council of Europe referred to Spanish PSB as an example of partisanism,¹ and Rodríguez Zapatero vowed that he would put an end to this situation if and when he became Prime Minister.

The State-Owned Media Reform Report (2005), albeit with significant changes, formed the basis for Act 17/2006 on ‘State-Owned Radio and Television’, adopting measures to strengthen editorial independence at RTVE and to transfer institutional control from the corporation to parliament. Among the measures favouring, directly or indirectly, the editorial independence of news programmes at TVE, two are worth highlighting: first, the chairman of RTVE was no longer appointed by the Prime Minister, but by parliament instead; and, second, a dual system of participation for news professionals was established on the basis of ethical values and principles. This involved, on the one hand, the forming of News Media Councils (Consejos de Informativos) as the internal organs of participation for news professionals at RTVE, with the aim of supervising its independence and news objectivity and accuracy; and, on the other, the drafting of the RTVE News Information Statute (Estatuto de informacion para RTVE), whose final draft was approved by an internal referendum held in 2008. From the submission of the final draft of the report to the passage of the Bill through Parliament, several provisions that provoked heavy criticism, in particular due to the redundancy plan (Expediente de Regulación de Empleo: ERE), which resulted in the early retirement of almost 5000 employees aged over 50, found their way into to the new Act. At the beginning of 2010, a further change in the funding model of RTVE was introduced: advertising was abolished and the loss of revenues was compensated by a fee levied on the operators of private television channels and telecom companies providing internet access.² This provoked a spate of heavy criticism since the funding model implemented was found to be highly precarious (Soler, 2012: 92). At the same time, other measures considered harmful to PSB were implemented (2010), such as limiting the number of films and sporting events that the public corporation was allowed to buy.

In June 2012, with the conservative People’s Party (PP) again in power and despite the recent call made by the European Council (16 February 2012) to reinforce PSB independence from government, a new reform allowing governments with sufficient parliamentary support to unilaterally designate RTVE’s chairman was introduced. In accordance with this new procedure, Leopoldo González-Echenique was appointed as RTVE chairman. A senior civil servant who occupied important posts during the previous People’s Party (PP) governments of Jose María Aznar (1996–2004), González-Echenique appointed Julio Somoano to the post of Head of News Services. Somoano was part of the editorial team when RTVE was found guilty of manipulation. This appointment was made despite the opposition of the News Media Council, which stressed the fact that news professionals had voted against it in an internal referendum held in July 2012. In January 2013, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) expressed its concern over the political pressure being brought to bear on public service broadcasters in Spain, reminding Member States that people with conspicuous political affiliations should not be considered for senior management positions.

Furthermore, audience measurements suggest that the 2006 institutional reform of RTVE was positive on the whole, while the latest counter-reforms have had a negative impact at least in terms of share. According to audience figures, in October 2007, a few months after the reform, TVE news topped the rankings and maintained this position for 65 months. A survey conducted in June 2011 by TNS–Grupo Kantar confirmed that TVE news was preferred by 25% of all television viewers, as opposed to 15% in the case of Telecinco, its closest rival. However, TVE news dropped from first place in February 2013.³ This shift in audience support occurred in parallel to the latest involutionary reforms, and the news programme’s loss of leadership was finally certified a few months after the appointment of Julio Somoano as Head of TVE News Services.

Challenges faced by Spanish and European PSB

In addition to government independence, a problem mainly faced by southern and eastern European countries, European and Spanish PSB share three enormous challenges. First, pluralism – both in the media in general and news programmes in particular – is one of the cornerstones of European legislation in the field of audiovisual communication. The Amsterdam Treaty on PSB (1997) states that ‘the system of public broadcasting in the Member States is directly related to the democratic, social and cultural needs of each society and to the need to preserve media pluralism.’ This principle is also explicitly acknowledged in the following pieces of EU legislation:

the Audiovisual Media Services without Frontiers Directive of 2007,

the subsequent Audiovisual Media Services Directive of 2010,

and the Charter of Fundamental Rights attached to the Treaty of Lisbon of 2009 (Article 11).

In the case of Spain, the Constitution enshrines pluralism as a universal value that must be legally present in any political activity, in the broadest sense of the word, and thus includes the media (Díaz Arias 2011). It therefore constitutes a permanent challenge for public television broadcasters. In this article, pluralism is regarded as the inclusion of social and political diversity in the news.

Second, public television also faces the challenge of differentiating itself from commercial channels, while maintaining audience shares that justify the scope of its social function (Callejo et al., 2010; Mateo and Bergés, 2009, 214). This issue generally affects all PSB operators in Europe: ‘There is growing criticism about a decline in public service media distinctiveness and these organisations compete aggressively with commercial rivals’, even among traditional PSB allies such as the academic community and non-governmental organizations (Lowe and Steemers, 2012: 1). Authors such as Bustamante (2004: 60), Holz-Bacha and Norris (2001: 123), and even the Spanish Association of Commercial Broadcasters UTECA (2008), have warned that television news programmes are becoming increasingly commercial and trivial (see, for example, Langer, 1998, or Thussu, 2007).

In this context, PSB news programmes may serve as a benchmark whose purpose is to place limits both on this drift towards commercialism and on the interests of private channels, something that is extremely difficult to achieve in a commercialized environment that strives to impose its logic on the media ecosystem. It is well known that the standard of PSB is higher when there is a healthy commercial sector that produces programmes of quality and, equally, commercial media are obliged to provide viewers with a better service when there is a viable public sector (McChesney, 2004: 250). At the same time, ‘the impoverishment of the televisual message is less evident when there is no benchmark,’ and it can happen that ‘the loss of quality in the programmes of public operators becomes a basic element of survival for private operators’ (González Pascual, 2009: 24). The Spanish media system – in which there are five main national TV operators (one PSB, plus four commercial ones⁴) – is one of the most deregulated in Europe (Zallo, 2010: 3), a factor which favours the prevalence of commercial logic over that of public service. Further deregulation of the Spanish audiovisual sector in 2009 paved the way for new mergers between the main private operators: Telecinco with Cuatro, and Antena 3 with La Sexta

Third, in this tense climate, European public broadcasters are finding that they are increasingly under pressure to become more citizen-centric in order to forge a stronger relationship with the general public and to reinforce the idea of participation (Brevini, 2010, 205; De Haan and Bardoel, 2012; Lowe, 2010). Perhaps this strategy is used to counteract the fact that current trends in public service management tend to put the accent on cost control and productivity in a model in which ‘the citizen is recognised as the consumer but not as the owner or proprietor of public services themselves’ (González Pascual, 2009: 26).

This occurs in a parallel – and at the same time convergent – manner with the process by which PSB is being transformed into a public service media (PSM) through the broadening of media platforms and services (Hujanen, 2004: 133; Iosifidis, 2010, 1–2; León, 2011: 21). The fact that public service communication media can reckon with more channels allows them to offer news and other cultural products geared to different audience segments, thereby enabling them to counteract the negative effects of audience fragmentation. In the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), in the research project led by Agustín García Matilla, the 20 news professionals interviewed expressed the view that forging closer links with the public and the diversification of content for different audiences via several channels were two sides of the same coin in terms of strategy (Lamuedra and Lara, 2009: 122).

Qualitative study: General framework, context and methodology

Many authors have defended the need to understand the way in which audiences and producers interpret media texts. As regards PSB news programmes, reception studies are central to understanding on what grounds and to what extent the public supports them. Moreover, Reese (2001, in Deuze, 2005: 447) suggests that the ideological perspective (which journalists have of their work) can be regarded as a global factor of influence on journalistic decision-making processes, which will have an impact on the news diet and, as regards PSB, on how professionals and citizens perceive the news. Furthermore, this issue must be a research priority if the existence of PSB news is to be considered vital for maintaining a well-informed citizenry in democracy (Curran et al., 2009).

Therefore, the authors support Livingstone’s call (1998: 2–5) for a research agenda that not only connects audience research with production studies and textual analysis, but also, and more importantly, with an analysis of the broader media policy context (1998: 5), in order to better understand the complex dynamics between communication policies and the ways in which people and/or communities (including professionals in newsrooms) tend to interpret media texts. This article offers a modest contribution in that direction.

So, what is pursued here is a specific line of research on European PSB news professionals and audiences, with the aim of helping to plot a map, whose completion will require further and more systematic research. It offers new data about the evolution of Spanish PSB, which can be analysed comparatively to the results of García Matilla’s study (2010) on the BBC and TVE, in which the challenges of editorial independence, pluralism, differentiation from commercial channels, and forging closer links with the public appeared both in its framework and in the discourses of news professionals and viewers. Conducted between 2007 and 2008, the aforementioned study will be referred to whenever relevant.

As regards research on news professionals’ perceptions, this study is also related to that of De Haans on Dutch NOS Nieuws newsrooms, in which responsiveness and public accountability were researched, and in which all the other challenges (except independence) were present. Haggen (1999) also focused on the image that the journalists of the Norwegian PSB NRK had of the public, as well as suggesting that PSB should take the lead and forge closer links with audiences at a time of digital convergence.

Furthermore, several relevant European audience studies on news viewers have also been conducted, such as that of Madianou (2005) on Greek news viewers in which issues concerning editorial independence and news diversity were foremost. More recently, there have been several studies on PSB news viewers’ participation and user-generated content, such as those conducted by Bakker (2012) on the BBC, or by Hartmann (2010) on a German radio channel and the Finnish PSB YLE, in a scenario characterized by the challenges and difficulties faced by journalists and viewers when it comes to collaborating, the need to find a distinctive social role for PSB as regards commercial channels, and the multi-platform context.

In the summer of 2009, as part of their research into the reform of RTVE, in the framework of a larger R+D Project,⁵ the authors conducted a qualitative study based on interviews with TVE professionals and discussion groups with viewers. This study not only included research into TV news readers’ and producers’ discourses, which will be covered here, but also into the content of a sample of TVE news programmes, compared with their commercial channel counterparts – Telecinco, Antena 3 and Cuatro – at the time of sample collection, by means of quantitative (content analysis) and qualitative methods (visual analysis and discourse analysis) (Martínez-Nicolás, 2010). The general aim of the R+D Project was to establish whether there was a discourse about news specific to public television and, if so, whether it conformed to the objectives of independency, pluralism, distinctiveness, and the right of access that citizens have to information and media representation, as laid down in the Spanish Constitution. Some of the results of the content analysis applied to Spanish TV news will be included in the authors’ analysis when appropriate.

The interviews and discussion groups took place at a time when news professionals were already subject to and backed by the News Information Statute and News Media Council, the redundancy plan had already taken place, and a further change in the funding model of RTVE had just been announced: the end of advertising in 2010. It was also before the current government could unilaterally appoint an RTVE president and the announcement of budgetary cuts to the tune of €204m. Specifically, the study was conducted in the middle of the period from 2006 – 2011, between the 2006 reform, which has been widely regarded as positive in terms of independence, diversity, and quality (Bustamante, 2010; Zallo, 2010), and the PSB ‘counter-reforms’ first introduced in 2009 by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and which the PP stepped up considerably in 2011 and 2012.

The study involved 14 interviews⁶ with TVE news professionals, as well as six discussion groups held in Madrid⁷ with viewers of the news programmes of all the television channels broadcasted at the time.⁸ The sample was designed in order to obtain sufficient diversity: as regards news professionals, it included several professional categories and levels of responsibility, as well as taking into account the early retirement plan, which was still recent in everyone’s mind (managers, editors, technicians, two people who had taken early retirement, and a journalist who was one of the few veterans to decide not to accept the plan). As to news viewers, the sample focused on diversity – social class, age and gender. The groups were built so as to represent different positions in the social structure in relation to the news, with an eye to highlighting any shared discourse. The focus groups would later confirm or reject whether this was true.

The sample was obtained using the snowball sampling technique, and interviews were semi-structured. Since the dynamics of the sessions were designed to build on viewers’ ideas about television news, the first thing participants were asked was to voice their opinion on the context of television news. Discourse analysis methods were applied to the full transcripts, and the main discourses of the viewers and professionals were described and illustrated using shared views and opinions. Later in the process, the discourses of both groups were analysed so as check whether they addressed the challenges faced by TVE news services. In short, this discourse analysis conducted in 2009 made it possible to assess the perception that both the viewers and professionals held of the transformation undergone by TVE news since its reform in 2006, and how these transformations responded to the challenges that are currently faced by Spanish and European PSB, according to the literature available on the subject.

Challenges faced by TVE according to professionals and viewers

As already mentioned, TVE news faced (and still does) four fundamental challenges, which are all interrelated:

Independence from government.

Pluralism in news content: political and social diversity.

Citizen centricity.

Differentiation from commercial channels.

The perceptions held by TVE news professionals and viewers are discussed below.

Independence from government

Undoubtedly one of the main objectives of the 2006 reform was to achieve greater independence from the government of the day. Judging by the answers given by the TVE respondents, there appeared to be a wide consensus on the degree of success achieved in this regard. Some justified their replies on the basis of a comparison with the past, when TVE was constantly accused of manipulation (2), the acknowledgement of the political parties (4), or a break from the political control prevalent at TVE since its creation, achieving as a result ‘a level of professional independence that has never existed before’ (6). This justification might also be based on the absence of complaints, which is interpreted as evidence that there has been sufficient improvement (8).

The responses thus revealed a shift from a situation in which political interference was a constant constraint towards a new scenario, in which decisions and interactions are governed by a new set of rules. This was met with understandable all-round satisfaction – hesitant in some cases, and more pronounced in the case of the managers – with the achieved level of independence from government: ‘Now is the most rewarding time for us, we are less dependent in everything’ (1). Although a long-standing objective, it was only then that RTVE professionals were really beginning to incorporate the capacity of independence into their daily work. It was taken for granted that complete independence is impossible, although the challenge was to achieve this goal to the greatest degree possible, particularly in terms of economic and political control.

According to some respondents, this greater independence from government would then allow the debate to take place within the context of professional journalism: decisions were no longer made so much with political considerations in mind but on the basis of professional criteria, determined in the case of TVE by its public service role. Similarly, editorial decisions that previously would have been regarded as government manipulation would then be classified as ‘professional errors’ (6). This view was held particularly by managers, who likewise defended their authority to impose their journalistic criteria on their staff in strictly professional terms: ‘[It is] bad if your boss becomes a government mouthpiece but when the boss acts on the basis of professional criteria, what you can’t do is say that he is censuring you; it’s not like that’ (6).

Notwithstanding the widespread consensus on the greater independence from government of TVE news programmes, there was a number of more critical or jaundiced viewpoints, singling out several bad habits that persisted regardless of the new-found independence of TVE news professionals: ‘self-censorship’ and ‘domestication’ by journalists (12); the assignment of tasks based on the editor’s political affiliation (14); and independence achieved at the expense of renouncing in-depth political analysis, employing a superficial statement-based journalistic approach (14); or treading carefully when such issues might prove awkward for the Government (2). Along these lines, there were also some evasive responses: ‘Independence is not a feature of the media but of society’ (9).

This significant step forward, as endorsed by TVE news professionals, was nowhere near as evident for the general public according to the results of the discussion groups. No group spontaneously discussed greater independence from government in relation to TVE news. Only when the group moderators explicitly asked those taking part to consider the changes in public television news programmes were certain advances acknowledged, including a greater degree of neutrality compared with the past, even though for viewers this recognition came hand in hand with the traditional association – forged during the dictatorship of Franco and maintained during democracy, and thus difficult to eradicate – between public television and the manipulation of news content.

These results, both in relation to professionals and viewers, confirm those obtained in the research conducted by García Matilla (Callejo et al., 2010: 125–172).

Pluralism in news content: Political diversity

Directly related to independence from government is the notion of achieving a greater pluralism of ideas in Spanish PSB news programmes. Giving a say to a greater number of political parties (with parliamentary representation) is part of this challenge, which is referred to as political diversity. Regarding this issue, which was understood as part of a public service ethos, the general opinion of those news professionals interviewed in the study was once again one of relative satisfaction.

TVE news professionals stated that public television ought to reflect the political diversity of the Spanish parliament, adding that the two-party focus was an exclusive shortcoming of the commercial channels, a conclusion also expressed in the previous research mentioned above (Callejo et al., 2010: 138). Nevertheless, they acknowledged that TVE had not succeeded in shaking off this yoke either, a problem which was blamed directly on the two major parties’ attempts to monopolize the political scene. Once again, the argument put forward as evidence of this political pluralism was that TVE had been capable of recognizing the demands of society and putting them into practice through the News Media Council, which was indeed mentioned by the news professionals, as well as the fact that there were few complaints from the opposition party at the time of this study. This contrasted with a previous period when accusations of manipulation were indeed commonplace – especially between 2002 and 2004 – even among TV news professionals who created an Anti-manipulation Committee to defend their professionalism in the face of mounting pressure from the Head of News Services. This committee can be regarded as the embryo of the current News Media Council.

The professionals interviewed were also calling for qualitative criteria for assessing pluralism, which went beyond explicitly temporary measurements – ‘without making it a race against time’ (8) – once again calling for independence so as to be able to be governed by strictly professional criteria within a public service work ethic that, as they acknowledged, also implies paying attention to minority parties (‘The only risk I see sometimes is not so much the proportion of screen time allocated to the Government and the PP,⁹ but the pressure of a two-party system’ (13)).

As regards this issue, apparently the public had noted a certain degree of change in terms of plurality, even if it were only in a formal sense, whereby formal plurality involves an approach establishing an equal allocation of screen time.

Pluralism in news content: Social diversity

The issue of pluralism has another dimension that goes beyond the political, namely social diversity or that which reaches society, its general concerns and those of significant social groups. In this regard, there seemed to be widespread, although moderate, satisfaction among the respondents with regard to the degree of diversity achieved in TVE news content in terms of issues of social interest. Despite this, according to the content analysis (Martínez-Nicolás, 2010) conducted as part of the R+D Project (of which this research can be considered a branch), almost 40% of TVE news featured politicians and relevant institutions, while only 22% addressed the so-called ‘social actors.’¹⁰ This ratio was more balanced in the case of TVE’s most direct competitors: Telecinco (31%/34%) and Antena 3 (29%/28%). Besides, in this latter category, almost half of the news stories dealt with non-affiliated individuals, i.e. people who were not representing any social group, association or movement. Furthermore, the data indicate that these individuals were normally victims of tragic events (e.g. incidents, disasters, accidents)

A further issue arises on abandoning the realm of content to enter that of ‘sources,’ namely the presence of organized civil society not as the subject of a news item but as an information source. The TVE professionals interviewed accepted that, while advances had been made in this respect, much still remained to be done and many stressed the blatant absence of opinion in civil society. On the whole, while admitting the complexity of the challenge, a large number of professionals agreed that TVE attempted to reflect the pluralism present in society by consulting diverse representative sources and individuals whose views echoed those of collectives, associations, minorities, etc. At the same time, however, a self-justifying discourse could also be discerned, which put the blame on associations in civil society for their lack of professionalism in getting their message across, whether it was because they focused too much on local issues, lacked credibility in some instances, did not know how ‘to sell the story’ (3) well enough, or because they failed to provide images to accompany news items.

Overcoming the hurdle of forging closer links with the general public could in this sense be seen as a distant possibility, since the respondents accepted that there was ‘an overdose of politicians in the news’ (1), justified both on the grounds of the importance of politics in the social realm of a country still without a deeply-rooted democratic culture in everyday life (8), and the dominant influence of official agendas on editors, particularly in the public media (13).

In fact, this issue was apparently of great concern to the respondents who were managers of news programmes, to the extent that it was constantly being monitored. In this regard, the managers (6, 8, 10, 13) argued for and recognized the need to broaden the concept of pluralism and diversity beyond the realm of politics.

TVE has attempted to strike a delicate balance between improving citizen news coverage and, at the same time, satisfying the political milieu. Recently, information and communication technology has opened up new opportunities and aroused great expectations for its capacity to provide diverse groups of citizens with more tailored offerings, while never straying from the blinkered vision of public service as regards the mere dissemination of content of public interest. In general terms, most news professionals assessed TVE’s website in positive terms.

Nevertheless, what respondents valued most was not so much the diversity of content but the possibility of being able to offer it at any time to a ‘sovereign consumer’ via television à la carte, ‘freeing’ the viewer from being tied to a schedule, so that:

you and your routine are not controlled by the programming of the channels, you don’t have to sit in front of the telly every day at 9 o’clock, but you as the consumer are the one who decides when and where you want to watch the news (11).

Citizen centricity

No explicit reference was made to the possibility of implementing measures keyed to forging closer links with different audience segments via diverse media platforms, and except for the odd reflection by the head of news programmes it did not appear to be one of the priorities of professionals at TVE.

As regards this second challenge, in the discussion groups the viewers voiced few specific demands for public television to strengthen links with the general public (apart from a general call for more cultural information and a further specific demand by younger people for greater access to information via different technological media, but without going into details).

Differentiation from private channels

The distinction between public and private television channels in general, and above all regarding news programmes, did indeed appear spontaneously in the viewers’ discourses. Overall, public television was still seen to be more prone to political intervention than the private channels. However, TVE was regarded as a refuge from commercialism, even prior to the withdrawal of advertising from the channel, while commercial TV was generally believed to be more subject to the influence of the market.

The general view was that public television was still subject to the same forces of formal modernization with relation to its news programmes, although, according to the discussion groups, it lagged behind the private channels. The same can be said for the trend towards tabloidization, although the viewers expressed their relief that this phenomenon was less evident in the case of TVE than in that of commercial television.

On the positive side, viewers appreciated the valuable role of public television in ‘certifying current events’ due to its long track record – something which was only questioned by the youngest respondents (FG 5) – as well as for its greater resources, particularly regarding correspondents and special correspondents.

When asked explicitly, the viewers did not seem to consider that there should be specific rules governing public television news programmes beyond that of doing their ‘duty to inform:’ for some, to the same extent as the private channels, since ‘the objective is to convey information that is as neutral as possible’ (FG 5); for others, to a greater extent, ‘As a viewer, I can accept a presenter giving his or her opinion, but I can’t allow this from a public channel, which has to be much more objective, much more plural, something which it doesn’t do …’ (FG 1). A more detailed analysis of these discourses indeed points to the existence of certain expectations of public service that pertain specifically to public television, such as the absence of advertising during the news or maintaining a greater degree of formality, together with the aforementioned obligation of presenting more cultural information and greater accessibility to content.

Nevertheless, the TVE professionals interviewed in this study certainly believed that they were living up to their duty to inform – ‘Maybe we don’t deserve an A+, but certainly a B’ (7). This was not so much because they believed that viewers expected this of them, but rather because it was their public service mission. They also recognized that they were subject to commercial pressures which hindered their public service-centric approach. For instance: ‘It is difficult to include stories about Zimbabwe every day in the main news, because you get the sense that if you do that, in the end 10 people will be watching the programme, instead of two or three million’ (9).

This focus on public service, however, was cited as an essential factor in distinguishing public television from the commercial kind: the TVE respondents did not see themselves as competing all-out against private television, even though its influence was acknowledged. This tendency towards homogeneity in content and formality and reciprocal influence was seen as the lesser of two evils and practically unavoidable (2, 9). Recourse to what competitors were doing was an excuse that they frequently used to justify their actions, indicating that there was some concern about the crucial role played by the challenge of differentiation in their everyday work routine, despite there being no consensus on exactly what form it should take.

Some respondents were less accommodating and complained of the constant attention to ‘what the competition is doing’ when selecting news stories. Respondent 14 complained that ‘in the end, we will all be alike’ because, as she explained at another point in the interview: ‘We are lagging behind.’ In other words, they were letting themselves be swept along by a type of consensus arrived at in a journalistic profession more concerned with what its competitors were doing than with its own criteria of newsworthiness.

Conclusions and discussion

As has been discussed throughout, public service television in Spain, in particular, faces several challenges in the existing European context, which must be overcome to safeguard its future legitimacy. News services – the driving forces of PSB – constitute an ideal scenario for assessing the extent to which these objectives are actually being met. With data analysis, it is possible to paint a general picture of the main discourses of TV news professionals and viewers with regard to the news programmes that they help to make, or watch, respectively. Further research would be necessary to explore in greater depth the nuances in the discourses of TVE news professionals or managers, or among TV news viewers of different ages and social extractions.

According to the authors’ findings, until September 2009 (when the interview stage was concluded) the TVE news professionals interviewed in this study believed that the goals of independence from government and pluralism were slowly being reached, thanks to the reforms of 2006. However, it must be noted that the respondents’ replies indicated that there still remained a lot to be done to fully achieve them.

With regard to independence, this study corroborates the hypothesis already put forward in the study lead by Agustín García Matilla from 2007–2008, which makes it possible to state that, at least between 2006 and 2009, TVE professionals felt that they were independent from the government of the day for the very first time, thus allowing them to focus on how to work independently on the basis of professional criteria, as well as how to avoid a superficial type of independence that ends up yielding to a kind of journalism that is too institutional and/or statement-based. It is certainly probable that this feeling of independence and pluralism continued at least until the new RTVE Chairman and Head of News Services were appointed in 2012, without parliamentary consensus or the agreement of PSB professionals.

However, the viewers did not yet appear to clearly perceive the efforts in independence and pluralism being made by TVE news during the study period, since this perception did not appear spontaneously in their discourse. On the other hand, according to the TVE professionals interviewed, the excessive institutionalization of news programmes still acts as a constraint for public television, which does not only have to strive to fully overcome the two-party bias, but also, according to some, ought to offer more social pluralism. However, this study differs from that conducted from 2007–2008 insofar as some professional reticence about the use of community sources was detected, something which could be explained by the fact that this is a new concern that has surfaced only in the last two years or so, and its daily application must involve new challenges which were not on the agenda when social diversity was just a distant goal.

As to the challenges of differentiating PSB from private television channels and forging closer links with the public, the achievements so far are not so definite. The former is a clear challenge for professionals in public television, even if they appear to be caught in an awkward contradiction, being aware that they are different, while also constantly having to keep their eye on the commercial channels so as to identify these differences. The TVE respondents took on and defended the channel’s public service role, but failed to articulate a strong discourse on this point. The public service concept was partly regarded as a set of restrictions and obligations that prevented open competition with the private channels, and not so much as an asset establishing a clear set of guidelines for professional practice to be supported and legitimized by the public (García de Madariaga, 2011: 142). They acknowledged the influence of private television and were aware of the markedly dual nature of their working environment: the need to cultivate the traditional values of professional public service journalism as a cornerstone, and the difficulty of doing so in a context in which there is pressure to shift towards a more entertaining and banal journalism, within a highly liberalized media ecosystem with a significant presence of private channels which are not expected to provide a public service. This may explain the mixed, rather than openly serious, news model characterizing TVE’s news programmes. As for the viewers, their discourse also clearly reflected the need for differentiation between public and private channels, albeit based on the demands made of a television funded with taxpayers’ money. Nevertheless, they did not clearly identify how this should be done. The process of modernization embarked upon by TVE in the last few years was only perceived by the viewers in terms of aesthetics and superficial factors, which would seem insufficient to make up for its inflexible and pro-governmental past.

With respect to forging closer links with the public, apparently this was not even a priority challenge for the TVE professionals. Nor did the viewers seem to notice the hesitant efforts that TVE might have been making in this direction. Citizen satisfaction with how the public broadcasting corporation carried out its public service mission was even more relative. In addition, the discussion groups revealed a widespread lack of knowledge regarding the organizational changes implemented by TVE in recent years.

To sum up, it is clear that, for the first time ever, PSB professionals in Spain felt independent from government, which allowed them in turn to address other issues, such as social diversity. Despite the relative general satisfaction with the changes made by TVE in recent years, they betrayed a sense of uncertainty and caution regarding the future of public service television in the country. Taking into account the recent change in the political cycle, the challenges analysed here are of a particularly urgent nature. The change of government at the end of 2011 and the measures taken by the new government have only helped to highlight the uncertain future of PSB in Spain. The current and future perceptions of news professionals will have to be monitored with extreme care. The results of the discussion groups suggest that the progress made by TVE’s news services still had not been fully acknowledged by the public just before the counter-reforms of 2009, 2011 and 2012. This justifies concern over whether or not TVE public service news will have enough public support in the short term so as to build on the advances that have already been made in the provision of public service during the period from 2006–2011.

Footnotes

Funding

This article derives from the project ‘La autonomía y el pluralismo de la nueva RTVE, a examen: contenidos de los teleinformativos y percepciones de la audiencia’ (The autonomy and the pluralism of the new RTVE, to review: content of the news programmes and perceptions of the audience) financed by Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Comunidad de Madrid, Code URJC-CM-2007-CS. Duration of the project: 2008–2010.

Notes

Author biographies

José M García de Madariaga is Lecturer at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid (URJC), where he teaches Journalism, Online Democracy and Digitization. In 2003 he received his PhD in Sciences of the Information from Universidad Complutense of Madrid, with a dissertation about the mainstream media counter-informative influences in the digital era. Since then, he has undertaken research focussed on various ways in which digitization influences the processes of social communication, especially in journalism and citizenship. Among them is his book El periodismo en el Siglo XXI: Una profesión en crisis ante la digitalización (Journalism in the 21st Century: A Profession in Crisis Facing the Digitization) (2008) Dykinson).

María Lamuedra Graván is Lecturer at the University of Seville. In 2004 she received her PhD in Media Studies from Glasgow Caledonian University, with a dissertation entitled: Readers, Storyworlds and the Popular Public Sphere: A comparative analysis of women’s magazines in Spain and the UK. Her research looks into the relationship between the public sphere and some of the most influential media genres, such as the news, celebrity stories and soaps. In 2007, she published Aristócratas, meritócratas y famosillos’: Cómo participan lectores y televidentes en las historias de famosos (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre) and Las historias de famosos en la sociedad mediática (Diputación Provincial de Huelva). Public Service Television is also an important object of her research. In this field, in 2010, she co-edited Los informativos diarios en BBC y TVE (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre) and in 2012, she edited El futuro de la radiotelevisión pública: la necesaria alianza con la ciudadanía (Editorial Popular). In English, she co-authored with Hugh O’Donnell Terms of engagement: EastEnders, public service and cultural citizenship (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2013). Her later book chapter is entitled: Life Without a “Liberal Representative” Journalism: Towards a Professional Deontology with a Deliberative Turn (Life without media, by Eva Comas, Joan Cuenca and Klaus Zilles. Peter Lang)

Fernando Tucho Fernández is Lecturer at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) in the field of Journalism. As a researcher, he has participated in several projects on news content analysis and the sociology of newsrooms. In 2004 he received his PhD in Sciences of the Information from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid with a dissertation about media education and digital television. He has served as Director of Research at ‘Web and TV Contents Research Laboratory’ at URJC and also as coordinator of news analysis at Corporacion Multimedia Consultants. Among his latest publications can be mentioned La información medioambiental en los telediarios (Environmental news in newscasts), co-authored with Pablo Francescutti and Manuel Martinez Nicolas (Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico, forthcoming), based on content analysis of a whole year of TV news programmes.

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