The control commission of the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation (CCMA) met this Friday in the Parliament, where the spokesmen of the parliamentary groups asked the president of the body, Rosa Romà, as well as the directors of TVC, Sigfrid Gras, and from Catalunya Ràdio, Jordi Borda, for the informative treatment of the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Catalan public media.
Romà has defended the fairness and rigor of the work carried out by the correspondents in the area and the information services that work from Catalonia, both from TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio, and has expressed his satisfaction with the work carried out by public media professionals. , which contextualize a conflict with very deep historical roots and serious economic and social repercussions.
On behalf of ERC, the party that supports the Government, deputy José Rodríguez Fernández has celebrated that the correspondent in Jerusalem has been reporting from the field for decades and has congratulated the director of TV3 for his coverage of a conflict in which the Government of Israel “violates human rights”, which is why it has rejected the possibility of talking about “war propaganda” and has praised the “equianimity” of the Catalan public media, which, in its opinion, cannot be neutral in the face of the “apartheid” that exists, in his opinion, in Palestine.
“We want to explain the things that happen in the world from a Catalan perspective,” explained Gras, for whom it is important to put the conflict in context and offer both the Israeli and Palestinian vision, but also broaden the focus to, in addition to the deployment carried out there, take into account the points of view of Russia or the United States, for example.
Much more critical has been the Ciudadanos spokesperson, Anna Grau, who, far from joining the congratulations of ERC, and without doubting the professionalism of the TV3 journalists, has questioned the “mental framework” in which they work, which she considers “biased and restrictive”, especially in analysis programs, not so much in purely informative ones. In this sense, Grau has referred to the parliamentary declaration of support for Israel that Ciudadanos promoted together with Junts, the PSC and the PP, which, from her point of view, has not had the deserved echo on TV3.
An intermediate position has been exhibited, for her part, by the PSC deputy Beatriz Silva, who has praised the coordination of the media of TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio in the Middle East to improve information coverage, but has also shown her concern about the interference of the social networks in the knowledge of the facts, since their contents are in many cases not sufficiently verified and cannot be verified. “Technology is never neutral,” lamented Silva, who has asked to protect the audience from hate speech and calls to violence that proliferate on the networks.
Gras has conceded that the conflict between Israel and Gaza is a “very difficult to follow” conflict from which images arrive that cannot be broadcast “in any way” due to their extreme cruelty. In this sense, he has defended that TV3 does it “very well” by applying restrictions and not falling into “exhibitionism” or “sensationalism.”
Borda has seconded this and has assured that those of TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio are “the best newsrooms in the country” and that having “reliable” information on the ground is the best way to avoid being victims of fake news. “Public media have to spend citizens’ resources explaining conflicts as complex as this one,” he concluded.
