In Portugal, there exists no tradition for news media to endorse publicly a political party or a presidential candidate. All of the main media insist on independence as their supreme value, promising to offer their audience all the relevant perspectives on any issue under debate. The lack of any kind of institutionalised external pluralism is thus fulfilled by internal pluralism, both in the newsroom and in the set of outsiders invited to regularly write opinion columns. Notwithstanding this general position, the fact is that we sometimes listen to complaints by the public against bias in the media, to the point of suggestions that everything would be more transparent if those in the media assumed a clear political position instead of dubious independence.
The leading news media, except the online-only Observador, are usually very open to different voices in the op-ed pages, thus stimulating the political debate. Additionally, journalists also have the opportunity to analyse and comment in different ways.
News media tend to be critical of the government and of the ruling party, following a tradition of counter-power that is usually associated with journalism and with its watchdog function. The opposite occurs when it comes to the PBS, or even to the national news agency. There is a consistent suspicion that the government tends to get better coverage by these media outlets because they depend directly on public funding.
The ERC now systematically monitors the existence or absence of political pluralism in the PBS news bulletins and has concluded several times that there is some over-representation of the government and its supporting party (the Socialist Party) in the news, apparently at the cost of the main opposition party (the Social-Democrat Party) which is often under-represented. More recently, in its report about political pluralism on the main television channels in 2018, ERC generally concluded that this trend remains. In fact, daily information programmes tend to give between 17.0 per cent and 23.5 per cent of their time to government and its supporting party while the other five parties represented in the Parliament get between 10.0 per cent and 24.1 per cent of the time, according to different newscasts and channels (ERC, 2019a). As for political parties not represented in the Parliament, their time doesn’t go beyond 0.1 per cent to 0.3 per cent of the time dedicated to news.
The results of this monitoring activity are present in the minds of the editors of public television, as we were told by different sources from the newsroom. There is nowadays more concern in PBS when it comes to deciding what to cover in the political agenda, with an effort to balance the journalistic relevance of the issues with the need to respect the “quotas” of broadcasting time defined by ERC in terms of “reference values” for each political party.
