I think it was in this newspaper, quite a few years ago, where Antonio Negri complained about the arrogance of intellectuals against sport in general and football in particular. Something similar happens with television: most of the intelligent heads that I know state not seeing or not having it in their homes . It is a legitimate and attentive position if we take into account the progressive devaluation that its contents have been suffering over the years. Interestingly, this devaluation has not prevented it from continuing to be the means of communication to which most Spaniards devote today. A recent study (Windward Communication) indicated that in 2018 the Spanish were more than four hours a day in front of the television. After sleeping and working, it is the activity to which we dedicate more time.
It is often said that the television audience is crossed by the age variable. And it's true. Those over 50 are the ones who spend the most moments in front of the silly box . I am not sure, however, that this is a generational issue. I explain myself: there are those who point out that the youngest ones will replace TV with social networks and other models on demand. However, the networks also have age ranges that show great substitute capacity , because while the forties are anchored on Facebook and the thirties on Twitter, from there down Instagram seems to be the winning network. Thus, it is not surprising that, given so much fragmentation of formats, the April CIS respondents declared 84% that their favorite medium for information on politics is television.
This preference is reflected, in my opinion, in the notable increase in audiences that the media has been targeting, with some parentheses, since practically 2007. This growth was due to the digitalization of the signal and the multiplication of the television offer. The General Audiovisual Law of 2010 came to incorporate the European consensus on the subject (Directive 2007/65 / EC), which established the need to guarantee pluralism from a social, cultural, linguistic and, above all, political point of view. By the end of the decade, the Zapatero Government had already completed a process begun by Aznar in 2000, which involved recomposing the old analog television in a public service of general interest with significant limitations for the individuals who provided it.
That this process has failed from the point of view of media literacy, a matter of vital importance given the invasiveness of television in the formation of individual will, few doubt it: the fiasco of self-regulation provided for in the Law itself for operators private or the dissolution of the State Audiovisual Council in the National Commission of Markets and Competition, they demonstrate. However, it has been successful in its intention to distribute channels taking into account the ideological cleavages of society , it seems to me undoubted. We would say that in Spain multichannel television has brought multiparty democracy. Although the goodness of this transformation is possible, a serious analysis is about to be made on how the division and distribution of the political market among television companies has had an impact on the emergence of new forces that already occupy almost the entire parliamentary spectrum in programmatic terms. But beyond this heuristic issue, in my opinion we should be concerned about how current audiovisual communication affects the correct functioning of the political system in terms of effectiveness.
And, although there are differences between the public and the private, between the state and the autonomous, on issues of general interest, televisions have long been guided by criteria of a show that has left behind the notion of analytical and objective journalism . Television programs aspire for the first time to broadcast live the most important political events . They do it in the same way as a sports board on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Nothing exemplifies this statement better than the communicative paroxysm reached during Sánchez's failed investiture last July: for five days we had a real state of television exception that, with the help of social networks, allowed us to follow the unexpected turns of the negotiations to form a future government.
When Pablo Iglesias said that the "politics of the reserved" was over, we did not imagine that the alternative would be a video with a script that seems to mix drama, comedy and even science fiction in equal parts. These weeks ago the script sent us to the imposition of a story about who is to blame for not having a government in Spain. This story has been deployed in the different channels through increasingly ideologized newscasts, live follow-up spaces at the service of the communication advisers of the parties and some gatherings that constitute the paradigm of the historical moment we suffer: polarization, conflict and activism as vectors of an eternal electoral campaign that the viewer can follow with popcorn from the sofa in his house.
Almost 20 years ago, the great political scientist Giovanni Sartori theorized the conversion of homo sapiens into homo videns . This conversion would be caused by the substitution of the word for the image , which would lead to a progressive cultural impoverishment that would affect the human being from his childhood until his transformation into an adult. The proliferation of screens and the digital colonization of life only reinforces this bleak panorama. Politically, the Italian author also prophesied a democratic crisis because television prevented the formation of a critical mass of informed citizens who could correctly exercise sovereignty by making use of the resources offered by the former public opinion. What Sartori probably did not imagine is that state institutions and bodies could eventually become a kind of set in which the focus would blind any possibility of consensus between parties: because one thing is the theatricalization of politics and another very different communicative exhaustion
This exhaustion has already taken its toll: the elections are repeated without the possibility of stable governments since 2016. If this is so, it is because television and image have allowed us to enter the promised land of transparency. I am of those who think, however, that representative democracy and politics as medication phenomena between power and the citizen, need a reasonable degree of gloom to function properly . Seeing how those sent by the parliamentary groups to the consultations with the King immediately run to the radio and television programs to tell their conversation with the monarch causes me perplexity. But this is just a banal example of a pairing between politics and television that can endanger the realization of larger projects than the investiture: the negotiation of a constitutional reform or the State agreements around sensitive matters such as education, immigration or autonomous financing.
It remains to be seen if the institutional blockade and the hearings can continue to feed back. The consumer may end up getting tired of the show . However, without the intention of prophesying, we must not rule out the possibility that partisan and charismatic hyper-leadership puts the project of long-term videotacia on the table: constitutionalize presidentialism to finish adapting the political system to the communicative infrastructure.
Josu de Miguel Bárcena is a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Cantabria.
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