Political interference in the Spanish and Catalan public service media: Attempts to reform and resistance to change (2006–2017)

© The Author(s) 2019. In their influential study of 18 Western media systems, Hallin and Mancini (2004) classified the media systems of southern Europe's young democracies under the Polarized Pluralist model because they considered political parallelism to be their most prominent trait. According to the authors, this model, in turn, is in keeping with the high level of diversity and ideological conflict that characterises such societies, and with the late development of their liberal institutions. In this model, of which Spain is a paradigmatic example, the profitability of the press is low and the penetration of television is three times higher than it is for newspapers. The State intervenes heavily in the media system, and its logic is one of clientelism and political instrumentalisation instead of rational-legal authority (D'Arma 2015; Fernández Alonso 2017; Iosifidis and Boucas 2015). Finally, journalism's degree of independence from the political sphere is very limited, as is its orientation towards public service ethics.