Catalan Government announces support for community media
[Gobierno Catalan anuncia apoyo a medios comunitarios]

Núria Reguero in Barcelona for www.communitymedia.eu

The General Director for the Media and Audiovisual Distribution Services of the Regional Government of Catalonia, Spain, has committed to recognise the not-for-profit media before the end of the current legislature at the roundtable “Third Sector Media in Catalonia: experiences and policies”, held on 27 November 2008 at the ECREA conference in Barcelona.

The debate, organized by the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the European Communication and Research Education Association (ECREA), gathered media activists, researchers and politicians at the Journalists College of Catalonia to discuss, among other issues, the status of the implementation of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), the release of new FM frequencies and the inclusion of not-for-profit media in the Catalan and Spanish regulation.

The General Director for the Media and Audiovisual Distribution Services of the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya), Gemma Domènech, committed to recognise the Third Media Sector as a separate one from the public service and the private commercial media: “It is a great value to have not-for-profit media. I do not think that you are pirates and I do not want you to be illegal any longer. That is why the Catalan Government will start a debate next year with the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia and all the actors involved”, she stated.

Concerning the lack of frequencies granted to the Third Media Sector in the Catalan region, Domènech pointed out to the problem of FM radio spectrum saturation in Spain and argued that the Government of Catalonia has no competences on that matter, given that this belongs to the State’s General Secretary of Planning and Management of the Radio Spectrum.

Speakers and the publicSpanish practitioners are demanding distinctive regulation for the third sector since long time and the context seems to have improved recently after the approval of two amendments to the Spanish Law for the Protection and Promotion of the Information Society (Ley de Medias para la Promoción de la Sociedad de la Información,
2007). Nevertheless, the General Director criticized the fact that this law only allows the legalization of TV stations that were broadcasting before the approval of the national law of local TV (Ley de la televisión local, 1995).

Specifically in Catalonia, some progresses have also been made with the approval of the Catalan Audiovisual Law (Llei de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya, 2005), which recognizes the specificity of not-for-profit media in the region. But, de facto, these media have been not granted broadcasting licenses because the licensing process was not adapted to the characteristics of not-for-profit media.

One of these projects is Ràdio Contrabanda, a radio station based in Barcelona, active since 1991 and part of the social movements of the city: “We have a history behind us and the citizens’ support, we do not aim to make financial profit, thus, we can not be treated as an station aiming for profit by illegal means”, remarked the station’s speaker Xavi
Apache.

Ràdio Bronka, a station aiming to broadcast locally information not covered by mainstream media, and La Tele, build up by the association Asamblea de la Comunicación Social, are other cases that face the same situation as Contrabanda. La Tele has also been fined €60.000 for not switching off the transmissions after it was decided that that it could
not get any license.“We, the Third Media Sector, are citizen groups aiming to have our own voice through our media, and our reality is an illegal ‘limbo’ because we do not fit neither in the public nor in the private categories”, Javier García, member of the Spanish's Network of Community Media (Red Estatal de Medios Comunitarios) and of the Free and Community Radio Union of Madrid (Unión de Radios Libres y Comunitarias de Madrid), said.

Núria Reguero
Communication Institute (InCom-UAB)
Autonomous University of Barcelona

Source:
http://www.communitymedia.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2...