A new scandal reveals the autocratic nature of the government of Pedro Sanchez. This is his meticulous plan to financially asphyxiate media outlets that do not belong to the constellation of newspapers he trusts.
That is to say all those whom Moncloa has classified as propagators of hoaxes and “pseudomedia”. In reality, all those who have the only common denominator of having published truthful information on corruption cases which affect those closest to the president.
According to a detailed report from the specialist portal Financial DirectorIt was the media agencies that raised alerts about the violation of the principle of neutrality in the distribution of institutional advertising.
It is a strategy developed by the Secretary of State for Communications, under the direct supervision of the President, and ironically anchored in the so-called “Action Plan for Democracy.”
The media agencies that make up the framework agreement by which the government manages institutional advertising denounce this La Moncloa unbalancedly favors media junkies over critics.
The consequence is that “the investment quotas in certain media and supports are modified, or even removing their presence, without any objective justification”.
Pedro Sánchez’s response to the judicial and journalistic investigations was to try to create a climate of intimidation against these counter-powers. And he found the formula to harm the disgruntled press without conveying to it the autocratic appearance of outright censorship: the broadcast of institutional advertising.
We must not forget that the purpose of institutional advertising is to provide citizens with public service information. Your planning must therefore meet objective parameters with audience ranking as the main reference.
The complete opposite of what the government is doing, by transforming this planning into an instrument to penalize critical media. To achieve this, it is necessary to modify the strictly professional justification of the investment quotas established by the agencies, by introducing capricious indicators or measurement parameters which are not recognized by the advertising industry.
It is obvious that These are measures expressly required to Cancel to certain uncomfortable media with a large audiencefor the benefit of others very far down the ranking which, under usual conditions, would not have been included in the distribution or would have benefited from a much smaller investment.
These discretionary criteria are all the more worrying, given the exorbitant expenses incurred and planned by the Government in this area. For 2024, it has budgeted 138.2 million euros for institutional advertising.
But the fact is that between 2019 and 2023, the Sánchez government has allocated 309 million euros to institutional campaigns. Double what the government spent Rajoy in six years. In other words, Sánchez spent an average of 61.9 million per year on institutional advertising.
Contrary to what was proclaimed in his plan of so-called democratic regeneration, The criteria and especially the result of the dissemination of institutional advertising are absolutely opaque. The government did not provide a breakdown of the items by support or means. It only provides the overall amount and then sends it to the ministries who, in turn, camouflage the recipients.
This is a real black box that cannot be opened even through the so-called Transparency Portal. Probably because the day we know the extent of what was received by the government media that serve as a battering ram for Sánchez against the opposition and the judges, we will be faced with a huge scandal with possible criminal consequences. The appearance of prevarication and embezzlement already hangs over senior figures of sanchism such as the Secretary of State. Valles or your number two snowy.
This obviously arbitrary practice contradicts the commitments of the Government Framework Agreement for the award of campaigns of the General Administration of the State, which provides that “the selection of media must be carried out according to technical criteria and be perfectly justified”. Furthermore, it ignores the requirements of the European standard from which the government now claims to draw inspiration.
When the government also announces the distribution of an additional hundred million to promote the digitization of already predominantly digital media, everything indicates that we are facing an attempt to quickly modify readers’ freedom of choice.
It is time for the Congress of Deputies, the courts and the European Commission itself to force Sánchez to open this black box filled with everyone’s money that will undoubtedly make the reptile backgrounds of the past.
