Sánchez and the press, a destructive relationship

One of the most important aspects of planning the management of a democratic government consists of how it will communicate with society and what will be the relationship model that it will maintain both with the media that, due to its editorial line, are considered related to its ideology and approaches. as with those distant from one and from the other. In this matter, it is especially noticeable when such a model is worked by amateurs or is designed by experts in the field.. The seven Spanish presidents who have succeeded each other, from Adolfo Suárez to Pedro Sánchez, have not considered that, in any case, the communication of the Cabinet and relations with the media were strategic matters.

It is not a coincidence —but rather a symptom— that the Government spokesperson has consisted more of a function that was entrusted to a head minister of a department unrelated to communication than a matter proper to a ministerial organic structure. In the executives of Pedro Sánchez this has been the pattern: Isabel Celaá (Minister of Education, spokesperson from 2018 to 2020), María Jesús Montero (Minister of Finance, spokesperson from 2020 to 2021) and, currently, Isabel Rodríguez (Minister Territorial Policy, spokesperson since July 2021).

It wasn't always like this. Felipe González created the Ministry of Government Spokesperson who entrusted Rosa Conde (1988-1993), sociologist (previously General Secretary of the Presidency and head of the CIS), who displayed skill and ability to communicate with the media, trying to maintain the correct balance. Later, José María Aznar appointed Pío Cabanillas (2000-2002) as spokesman minister, who had previously been responsible for public radio and television. He was efficient and would get on the phone. Other remembered spokespersons, either State Secretaries or Ministers, demonstrated adequate professional skills: from Rosa Posada (1980-1981) with Suárez, to Eduardo Sotillos with González (1982-1985), and in a singular way Josep Piqué (1998-2000). and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba (1993-1996 and 2010-2011), the two deceased, who left the mark of their warm personality, ductility and a wide range of dialogue in the newsrooms.

The extreme politicization of government communication and Manichaeism in the treatment of the media has been a very pernicious double phenomenon in this legislature, even more so since the media sector plunged into a time of crisis in which there are few solvent and financially solvent newspapers. independent. In addition, the irruption of technology, and in particular of social networks, would have justified specific political attention in the way of transmitting the messages of the Government and in the way of understanding oneself, or not doing so, with the media most critical of the Cabinet.

Last Monday the Prime Minister lamented the treatment he receives from the “conservative media”. He confessed it to Carlos Alsina on Onda Cero, a station “not affected” to which Pedro Sánchez had not granted an interview for four years. The PSOE general secretary had moments of fluid relations with some of these media, but later, faithful to his excessive impulses, he gradually abandoned the most adverse media territory, making full use of those who offered him more comfortable treatment.. It has been a serious mistake.

Was there another way to handle this delicate matter? Of course, yes: enduring the pull of criticism without reprisals (there have been), distributing information with impartiality, respecting the users-citizens of all media, dialoguing when there were problems of veracity, arbitrary biases or material errors and, In short, establishing with those responsible for newspapers, radio stations and television stations rules of engagement consistent with a critical situation in the media sector threatened by financial insufficiency, a false democratization of information, by the plague of false news and alternative truths and invaded by social networks turned into pseudo-informative jungles and full of trolls and bots. However, communication and media discrimination have been part of the confrontation strategy.

The Government —although this is not the only one, because others also made the same mistake and some regional governments of the PP like the one in Madrid also do it— has surrendered to the dynamics of philias and phobias and the result is that the irremediably confronted political blocs have reproduced themselves in the media factions. Now the president seems willing to tread wastelands of sympathy for him and his policies. It is late, even though it seems like a rectification and is understood as a contrition. What's more: it is a not very graceful media tour, and until now vetoed, in which the president caricatures himself as a jocund guy when he has given reliable evidence of not being one at all. Pseudojournalistic occurrences go to the extreme of representing Sánchez as an interviewer for his own ministers.

The philias and phobias —in bulk, without discerning serious and well-founded criticism from gratuitous and arbitrary ones and without evaluating the scope of the praise to separate flattery and interest from merit— have caused injuries that should not have been inflicted, much more with a coalition government between the PSOE and a party to its left that has not ceased to harass media and professionals of different ideological persuasions (the radical right is not deprived of this brutal exercise of stigmatization either) without even trying on the part of the socialists put a stop to the lawlessness. This issue is not fixed. And the experience has been very harmful for Pedro Sánchez, but also for the media, victims, conscious or unconscious, of a destructive relationship with this character and his environment..