We know what happens first when coup leaders strike. They take control of the state TV and radio station. We know what the SNP would have done if they’d won their referendum. Set up a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation on the grave of the BBC. So here’s one additional factor to note after Spain’s tumultuous week.
Catalonia has had its own television and radio services since 1983, delivering Catalan-only language programmes and – guess what? – paid for by the same government that declared quasi independence a few days ago.
Bias comes naturally, perhaps inevitably, in the reporting of poor anti-separatist demonstrations, in the constant flashbacks to civil guard police wielding batons and throughout the hours of political discussion. Two regular participants in those discussions – voices against independence, hired in the supposed name of fairness and balance – wrote an article for El País the other day, explaining why they wouldn’t be appearing any longer.
“The official thesis in Catalonia is that this is a natural, essentially good nation that for at least three centuries has been living in a situation of unsustainable colonial oppression within an artificial, perfidious Spain, from which we must escape,” Joan López Alegre and Nacho Martín Blanco declared.
“But when reality is reduced to a single theme, secession… then the presence of a single voice opposed to the thesis of the talk – facing three or four participants plus to the moderator … only serves to project the idea that it is a minority position, even a marginal one in Catalan society. Goodbye. We’ve been ‘useful fools’ too long.”
Their argument can be pursued in two ways. One, filled with the emotion that surrounds the independence vote; the other more reflectively. Let’s take the high road.
Language is a wild card when you try to define nationhood. The areas of inland Catalonia most committed to independence are also the likeliest to use Catalan as their first, and sometimes only language. They depend on TV3 and its four sister channels for their news, soaps and drama series, and rely on Catalan radio round the clock. The algorithms of their social media follow the same route. And the picture they’ve drawn for all of this is often at odds with the complexities you find in Barcelona.
They have lived in a media cocoon of settled opinion, convinced that the EU will welcome their new nation into its midst, that the economic outlook is untroubled, that “taking control” will solve all problems. Passion becomes ingrained. No need to draw parallel conclusions closer to home, but this mingling of fact and conviction crosses many borders. If you can make the rest of the world go away, then doubt becomes a stranger.
No one watching Spanish TV through this crisis should pretend that it’s not had its own biases. Nor should anyone believe that the BBC, charting its lugubrious, legally mandated way through the thickets of bias, can ever achieve consensual calm.
The more open the windows, the easier it is to breathe. Scotland’s own cocoon of devolution has weakened because SNP and now Tory success – as represented in parliament – make the national picture more relevant again. Brexit, too, is gradually opening eyes and horizons. But the language factor comes with an added twist. How did Catalonia wander so close to the edge of a cliff? Because – on screen, on the airwaves, in cosseted print – there was no real debate. Because (think Fox News) the semblance of real debate was quite enough, thank you. Think of the little boxes of diversity; then think adversity.
