The signatories of this proposal, including José María Tomás, president of the Foundation, request that a new public competition be called for the selection of the members of the Board of Directors and the Presidency of the RTVE Corporation.
«In the face of the current dynamics of misinformation, having independent public media that citizens can trust is essential for the health of our public sphere and the pending regeneration of our democracy. Reinforcing this guarantee requires working on political and social consensus that avoids partisan suspicions that can affect and serve as a basis for questioning the work of RTVE professionals. These commitments must be extended to regional and local public media.",they affirm.
In the statement they remember that Parliament modified the law on state-owned radio and television in 2017. "to recover the independence of the RTVE Corporation and pluralism in the parliamentary election of its bodies". A public merit contest was called, to which a hundred candidates were submitted, and a committee of experts chose the 20 names that obtained the best scores for their professional resume and the management project they presented for RTVE.
«However, four political parties -PP, PSOE, Unidas Podemos and PNV- They agreed to ignore the contest, ignore that scale and distribute the positions on the board of directors among the people they trusted who had participated in the process. This quota system has not only generated disappointment among RTVE workers, the associations and academic experts who had proposed the change, but it has shown that it gives rise to an unstable system, incapable of addressing future challenges., they add.
The signatories of the declaration indicate that the current election system "has demonstrated its ineffectiveness, both in eradicating the professional association between RTVE and political partisanship and in facing the future challenges that it shares with other European public service corporations in an environment of information disorder".
This declaration has been signed by different associations and unions of journalists and organizations, including the Federation of Journalists' Unions (FeSP) and the Union of Journalists of Madrid (SPM), the Union of Journalists of Andalusia (SPA) and the Union of Professionals of Communication (UPC-FeSP); the Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain (FAPE), and the Association of Communication Users (AUC).
Among the more than one hundred individual signatures are Carmen Caffarel, emeritus professor of Audiovisual Communication, former director of RTVE and the Cervantes Institute; Adela Cortina, emeritus professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy; professors and professors of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication from different universities; Rosa María Calaf, Yolanda Sobero and other journalists and RTVE staff, as well as the general secretaries and members of the FeSP and the unions of this Federation who have signed the declaration.