A great Spanish newspaper has been brought low by an age-old human defect – greed – just when it is needed most
Real democracy and free, pluralist media are joined at the hip. You can’t have one without the other.
Dismiss these as empty phrases, if you like, but for me they came to vivid life on May 4th, 1976, when I bought a copy of the first edition of El País in Bilbao. Spain was still a dictatorship then.
Almost every weekend, many thousands of citizens took to the streets, calling for democracy. The so-called forces of public order answered them with tear gas and, sometimes, live ammunition.
Until El País appeared, all newspapers were controlled by the old regime. News coverage was severely censored. Open, discussion of the country’s political options was confined to a few courageous, repeatedly banned, magazines.
El País changed all that, making democracy part of Spain’s daily discourse. Its influence on the relatively peaceful transition from the dictatorship that followed can hardly be exaggerated. Exemplary reporting of hard news, national and global, political analysis from diverse viewpoints, and even extensive philosophical reflections, made up an exceptionally nourishing menu.
And when all the ground gained for democracy suddenly fell away, on the night of February 23rd, 1981, with Lieut Col Tejero holding the Spanish parliament at gunpoint, El País rushed a special edition on to the streets in defence of the democratic constitution. Anyone who witnessed those events will tell you that this exceptional gesture made a palpable contribution to the coup’s failure. Had the coup succeeded, the paper’s founding editor, Juan Luis Cebrián, and his colleagues, would have paid a heavy price.
El País has its flaws, of course. It has, on occasion, become much too cosy with its friends in the Socialist Party (PSOE). But when PSOE leaders launched a shameful state terrorist campaign in the Basque Country in the 1980s, the newspaper’s editorials repeatedly castigated them.
Shocking price
On the face of it, the times we live in today are a little less dramatic than in the paper’s formative years. But perhaps, under the surface, they are not. Our globalised economies, in Spain, Ireland and many other places, are suffering. Great spoils are being seized by a self-selecting few, and our democracies lack all conviction to confront them.
It is all the more disturbing that, by coincidence or otherwise, great flagships of the democratic media are shipping water. The hitherto unthinkable demise of institutions like the New York Times now looks increasingly, well, thinkable.
El País, however, had seemed relatively safe despite falling revenues. It has never recorded an annual loss, though it may indeed do so this year.
But it has long been clear that its mother company, Prisa, has been overreaching itself with an avaricious and ill-advised international acquisitions strategy, in which Cebrián has been deeply involved. The paper he helped found is now paying a shocking price, not just in euro but in principles, just when Spanish democracy needed it most.
Spain’s crisis is not only economic but systemic and existential. Hard-pressed citizens are, understandably, losing faith in their political institutions. The idea of Spain as a unified nation state is challenged by leaders in the powerhouses of Catalonia and the Basque Country.
So a journalistic forum in which all options can be discussed is vitally important, especially in a country where democratic culture is still not embedded in all sectors of society. Hitherto, El País has stood almost alone for pluralistic opinion in the Madrid press. Other powerful media are routinely sensationalistic and vitriolic, relishing ideological hysteria and division and scorning reasoned debate.
Today, however, it seems that the paper’s cherished values are under severe threat. Two weeks ago, the paper sacked 149 people, one-third of its journalistic staff. Many are veterans, with a wealth of experience the paper can ill afford to lose. Some of them served the paper unflinchingly, though under daily death threat from Basque terror group Eta.
They were all summarily dismissed by email, and under the miserable minimum redundancy conditions imposed by the conservative Partido Popular (PP) government. El País had previously severely criticised these measures.
There is no doubt these journalists were very well paid. It is arguable that high salaries should be trimmed in these straitened times – if there were any sign that the pain was being spread evenly in society. “Journalists cannot continue to live this well,” said Cebrián recently.
However, as in our own ever- more inegalitarian republic, the very rich in Spain get richer while the poor become unbearably poorer and the middle class sinks towards poverty. Imagine how Cebrián’s words rankle with his erstwhile colleagues, who know that he earned €13 million (yes, million) in 2011.
‘Liberty and democracy’
And it is Prisa’s international strategy, presumably in pursuit of such super-salaries for executives, and not the wages of the staff, that is bringing the paper down.
However, the most serious problem at El País is not the sackings but the paper’s subsequent censorship of its most distinguished contributors and columnists. Some 30 writers, including Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa (not exactly a bleeding heart of the left, you may recall), have written to its editorial committee.
They describe the recent events “as one more step in the deterioration of the basic values of this paper, crucial for liberty and democracy in Spain . . . in the face of the deep economic, political and institutional crisis facing Spain and Europe”.
That El País has not published this letter, let alone replied to it, speaks volumes about a situation where plutocracy has supplanted democracy as a guiding principle. The decline of this once-great newspaper bodes ill for democratic media everywhere, and for democracy itself.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of two books on Spain.