At a pace as dizzying as it is tedious, the candidates to form part of the board of directors of RTVE have been parading in Congress for two weeks. They go by in shifts of half an hour. Discounting the time that the deputies consume, they face the challenge of summarizing in 10 minutes management programs that in some cases occupy 200 pages. Among the fifty applicants who have processed, there are well-known screen journalists (Paco Lobatón, Roberto Lakidain, Carmen Sastre, Jenaro Castro, Yolanda Sobero), former senior executives (Manuel Ventero, Eladio Jareño) and producers of long-standing programs ( Isabel Raventós, Javier Montemayor).
Theoretically, the new council should come out of the first rounds, but the fact of opening the fan and citing the 94 applicants generates a kind of uncertainty. Among the participants there is the idea that the parties have already divided the seats, that their members are determined and that the appearances are nothing but a paripe, a staging to try to give a transparent varnish to a process marked from its origin by the turbulence.
From what has been seen and heard so far, most of the interventions are politically correct and converge in common places: the corporation needs stable and sufficient funding, it is urgent to optimize sponsorships, minimize content outsourcing, ensure for independence and informative pluralism, rejuvenate the workforce, bet on digitization and not miss the train of platforms. The return of advertising: according to and how. From the canon: it depends. Proposals staunchly repeated by the applicants, who seem to have prepared their speech as the same manual.
Other more subtle offers call for a non-aggression pact between politicians to remove RTVE from the party ring. There are bets to create a hybrid television model in the face of the increasingly blurred frontier between linear and non-linear, and there is no shortage of ideas to merge La 2 and Teledeporte or launch RTVE Estudios as a locomotive of original, risky and quality content.
Beyond the plans to bring public radio and television out of the abyss, the most significant thing has been the announcement made by former councilor Miguel Ángel Sacaluga to request protection from the Constitutional Court, considering that the evaluation carried out in its day by the committee of experts (to shortlist 20 applicants) did not conform to the principles of merit, ability and transparency.
The interventions of the groups reveal the degree of interest in the contest. Sometimes it seems that the representative of Ciudadanos Guillermo Díaz is one of the few who has read the projects before sitting face to face with future directors. Other spokespeople throw cloned questions left and right. And there are no shortage of those who forget parliamentary courtesy, as could be seen in the attack by Vox deputy Víctor Manuel Sánchez del Real on candidate Ramón Colom. The accusations of manipulation, aggressiveness and pointing out and the sour tone of the ultra-rightist spokesperson did not like the president of the commission, Ana Pastor, who had to read him the card so that he would not enter the melee with the appearing parties and treat them “with due respect ”.
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