• Communication.The audience rewards the deployment of Canal Sur for the coronavirus

Canal Sur Televisión respected the principle of political pluralism and fulfilled its purpose of public service in the informative treatment of the pandemic. This is the conclusion reached by the Andalusian Audiovisual Council (CAA) after preparing a detailed report on the coverage that was given to the coronavirus crisis on public television in the first months of it. Of course, the Audiovisual gives a slight tugging at his ears when he notes some "not recommended practices".

The document, to which EL MUNDO de Andalucía has had access, measures the time spent in the informational spaces for the different political parties based on the analysis of the programs broadcast between March 14 and April 30. In total, 6,929 interventions with a duration of just over 62 hours have been examined.

The report, agreed in the plenary session of the body on May 12, aims to respond to the numerous complaints raised by both political parties -PSOE and Adelante Andalucía- and by unions, CCOO, which in recent months have been denouncing the partiality of the Andalusian public television and how at some point it had become a mere speaker of the Andalusian Government.

The Andalusian PSOE has been especially critical, which has denounced the partisanship of Canal Sur on many occasions and has criticized the political bias of the news after the signing of Álvaro Zancajo, which led Susana Díaz's party to file complaints with the Audiovisual and also before the Ombudsman.

The socialists even scrutinized the list of collaborators and socialists to question the impartiality of television.

But, according to the report and the response that the president of the CAA, Antonio Checa, gives to the complaints, Canal Sur TV generally attended, with some exceptions, its deontological principles.

In fact, the measurements made in the study rule out an imbalance in the time dedicated to the executive and opposition parties. In such a way that the institutional positions covered 53% of the total, being distributed between the Andalusian Government, with 25%, and the central one, with 24%. By political parties, the PP and Citizens were present in 52% of the time analyzed.

The "effort" of professionals

The qualitative analysis has been made from the study of ten news programs issued between March 22 and April 30 and, in his response to the complaints, the President of Audiovisual came to highlight the "effort" of the network and its professionals after recording "exhaustive information in an exceptional period", the one caused by the pandemic. A situation, adds Checa, "without precedent", which is evident in that 89% of the news broadcast by Canal Sur Televisión referred to the health crisis.

Likewise, it highlights the fulfillment of the "duty of public service entrusted to the RTVA" and which is reflected, in his opinion, in the large amount of information on the pandemic prepared to "keep Andalusians informed" of the situation I was living.

Along these lines, the plenary session of the CAA held on the 21st of March agreed by majority to recognize the work carried out by the RTVA, pointing out that the results of the study "do not have to respond to the general guideline" given the period of "evident exceptionality" that analyzes.

By majority, the Audiovisual considers that there was "balance" in the times occupied by the different public representatives and political offices and that the principle of political pluralism was respected.

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing, the report shows, and this is stated by the president of the CAA in his response to the complaints raised, that at "specific" moments and information the separation between information and opinion is questionable, as well as the absence of plurality or even informative impartiality.

This is what the Andalusian Audiovisual Council describes as "practices not recommended by the deontological code", for which reason it recommends extreme caution when preparing the information and keeping in mind the RTVA Style Book.

However, from all of the above it cannot be deduced, insists the organ's president, a "general questioning" of the information broadcast by Canal Sur Televisión during the health crisis.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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