Since the first regional television stations in Spain began broadcasting, the Valencian Community has been the only one to close this public service. It was decided by Alberto Fabra’s PP in 2013 and it was reopened in 2017, with the name À Punt. If you take a tour of the Spanish geography, as varied politically as it is culturally and identity-wise, you will be able to verify that the only place where the existence of this public service is questioned is, also, in the Valencian Community. They get surprised?
But there is more: each Valencian government, since 1989, has wanted to shape, at its discretion, the Valencian Radio and Television: the PSOE created the service and a model, the PP changed it in 1995 (externalization, debt and some criminal cases already judged and sentenced); The Botànic reopened it, with a bad Law designed by Podem, not very flexible and far from the digital paradigm; and now Carlos Mazón’s PP guarantees the existence of the public media; although the opposition criticizes that the change in majorities in the entity will serve to modulate the election of its managers. Time will tell.
In an ecosystem where the change in the consumption of audiovisual products is subjecting conventional television stations to a severe crisis, subject to the increasingly intense push of pay and on-demand television platforms, having regional television is presented as one of the few instruments of regional coverage (there are others, such as radio stations and even private television) capable of offering proximity information and maintaining a certain regional structure.
This is how all the Spanish autonomies understand it, and this is how it should also be understood in the Valencian Community. Another issue is the model, and its contents, but let’s also go to the evidence that it is an excellent tool to promote the use of Valencian.
10 years ago, we Valencians lost public television and its recovery was excellent news that should be valued much more. It is true that the audience is small, as is happening in other autonomous regions, in line with the decline in audience of the large state television stations. But having À Punt enriches our audiovisual space, contributes to the lack of Valencian cultural cohesion and offers the possibility of keeping active an industry that has been dying for years in the face of the push from other geographies, not only in Madrid, but also in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia or even Andalusia.
It would be desirable for the Valencian political parties to reach broad consensus on the public service model so that it is not called into question at each change in the political cycle. It’s possible? In the end, it is not about closing it, conditioning it or protecting it; It is about improving it in quality, for the benefit of an audiovisual space threatened by an international industry that, logically, does not have much interest in paying attention to our reality as Valencians.
