The Association of Journalists defends local information as a basic pillar of public media

The Board of the Professional Association of Journalists of Galicia expresses its deep concern about the announced disappearance of the local programming of the information services in the new grid of the Radio Galega that has been presented and will come into force next September.

The Radio and Television Corporation of Galicia announced on Tuesday to the workers the changes in the grill to the new season 2018-2019. Among the novelties of the programming is the suppression of local programming of information services, a decision that joins the closure, in 2010, of the delegations of Ferrol, Burela and Pontevedra.

The local programming has to be one of the basic pillars of the function of the public media, even more, if possible, in a population context like Galician and in a medium, the radio, which is one of the preferred by the public to approach the local news. Although from the direction it is assured that local information will continue to be offered within other spaces, this implies the loss of a time reference for the citizens within the programming, as well as a centralization of the information that makes the delegations less independent.

On the other hand, the Colegio de Periodistas regrets another of the novelties that the new programming of the public broadcaster brings: the disappearance of the Diario Cultural as an independent space. The corporation ensures that the change in format is due to a commitment to culture, which seeks to turn it into a structural element of the new grid, but regardless of whether the management is free to change the programming, this bet seems contradictory with the atomization of cultural programming and the disappearance of the referential format of culture in public media, which had 28 years of history.