How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

We were in the village hall; we'd finished eating; alcohol was involved. I was still managing to speak relatively coherent Spanish. Someone who works for Pinoso Medios de Comunicación (MCM), was talking to her pal. She was showing him something from a Facebook or Twitter page - sorry, I know, I'll try to say X from now on. I forget why I became involved in the conversation - maybe I was invited, maybe I muscled in drunkenly but, muscle in I did. The Facebook or X thing was mine. I vaguely remembered it. I had been complaining, in a gentle sort of way, that the local media were a mouthpiece for the current administration and responsible for promoting a Trumpton type image for the town - peace, harmony and tranquility.

MCM Pinoso has an FM and Internet radio station, an X feed, a Facebook page, a website and it publishes to the town hall website. There used to be a television station in analogue days. Now there is some sort of agreement with a local TV firm to broadcast special events from time to time. There may well be other outlets I've forgotten about but those are the main ones.

In the days when mobile phones were almost unknown, and the Internet was creaky, the town hall in Pinoso had the radio station, a local analogue TV channel and a monthly magazine called El Cabeço, named for the salt dome hill that overlooks the town. There was also an independent newspaper, one printed on paper with ink that stained your fingers, called Canfali. The newspaper was weekly. It covered the Vinalopó Medio; a geographical area that includes Pinoso and towns from Petrer and Monforte del Cid down to Hondón de los Frailes. I don't think Canfali had much of a circulation and one week it simply wasn't available and never re-appeared. A little later, a retired local school teacher tried running a local website with news, opinions, and quite a lot of reader participation but that folded too. There was a Facebook-based newspaper type publication called El Eco de Pinoso and I remember at least one locally based website trying to be a sort of Internet newspaper for the town - there were probably others, but none of them ever really became equivalent to a local rag. 

So, the only real survivors of the digital carnage, at least in Pinoso, were the media funded by the local town hall. They tried, for a while, to keep Cabeço, the print magazine going. It had always been free, but as it thrashed around in its death throes, they tried charging for the print version as well as giving it away free on the town hall website in pdf format. The truth is though that a monthly magazine just doesn't fit in a world where my mobile phone based news feed often picks up over 200 "proper" news articles per day. The regional newspaper, at least the one I know about, is called Información, I think it's Alicante based, and if there's a murder or something newsworthy in Pinoso that newspaper will pick it up.

Back at the village hall. The friend of the MCM person was saying that, in the old days, in El Cabeço, there was room for the opposition political parties to have their say, to disrupt the hegemony of the one remaining news outlet for Pinoso. I had joined the conversation late, the whisky was going down extraordinarily easily and I didn't remember my X message particularly well. I'd probably complained that MCM failed to report on the non-political local stuff, that it had nothing to say about the roadworks here or there, that the information about who was the new director of the local town band or the town basketball team was scant, that there was nothing on planning applications and even births, deaths and marriages was missing. I also probably suggested that the reporting of crimes and misdemeanours was a bit Truman Show to give the impression that Pinoso was free of drunken drivers, traffic accidents, break-ins and robberies. In fact, I probably moaned that there was almost nothing that wasn't town hall sanctioned. To put it simply - whitewash. It was only when I listened a bit better that the other person was arguing a suppression of any news that wasn't promulgated by the local ruling party - a political news blackout on anything that the local mayor wouldn't like.

The counter argument is that in these information-rich days, it's dead easy to subscribe to the social media of the other political parties, to find a different point of view but most people who look at the town hall media outlets don't approach the information published there thinking of political bias - they're just keeping up to date and they would no more look at the opposition political party media outlets any more than they look at the media outlets branded as being property of the ruling local party.

I don't think I'd necessarily go with the view that MCM is Pravda inspired but it could certainly try to be a bit more of a news outlet and report on some of the dissent especially given that I suppose we local taxpayers keep it afloat.