Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez will disburse €100 million from European Funds to fight media “disinformation”, he announced this week.
This would form part of a so-called “democratic regeneration” aimed at achieving “greater transparency and accountability” in Spain’s media landscape.
The €100 million “aid” will be disbursed to media with “independent editorial lines”, Sánchez’s government said.
The Government has not yet unveiled criteria it will use to disburse these funds or measure media independence.
These funds, though, would help these outlets “develop tools to better the quality of the information provided”, according to the PM’s office.
Sánchez argued the law would help advance the goals of the European Media Freedom Act, which entered into force in May.
“It is neither the mission nor the intention of the Government to distribute trustworthiness cards between some media outlets and others. That is the citizens’ job,” said Sánchez before Parliament.
“But it is the institutions’ obligation to develop what was agreed in Europe,” he emphasised.
The law would require media outlets to disclose information about their accounts, their shareholders, and their audiences.
“The citizens must know the financing sources of the media, the name of their shareholders, and their audience numbers,” Sánchez told MPs.
Despite promising to disburse €100 million in European funds, “we must limit the funding that public administrations can dedicate to the media so that there are no media outlets that have more public funding than readers,” said Sánchez.
He plans to “ensure that there are no political parties that buy editorial lines with the money of all taxpayers”, he said.
Sánchez also described disinformation and fake news as “new and powerful instruments” of “democracy’s old enemies.”
Claiming to defend transparency is “incompatible” with “intervening in the control of publicly funded media”, responded opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
The centre-right president of the Partido Popular (PP) suggested that Sánchez’s attempt to “punish” the media is a cover against “the corruption that looms around him,” a reference to the investigation against the premier’s wife for alleged influence peddling.
Sánchez’s plan “could end as the largest attack on freedom of information in the history of Spanish democracy”, Feijóo added.
Sánchez “wants to shut down the media that speak about [his] wife”, said Santiago Abascal, president of the Conservative Vox party.
Abascal said Sánchez was inciting an “ideological persecution” against dissenting media and called his words “totalitarian.”
For years, Vox has claimed there is a media bias against Conservatives.
Its think tank, Fundación Disenso, which Abascal presides, published a report last year arguing there is “a predominant leftist bias within the journalistic profession.”
