In Portugal, there is no tradition for news media to publicly endorse a political party or a candidate. All 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 institutionalized ‘external pluralism’ is, thus, allegedly 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 often listen to complaints by the public against bias in the media, up to the point of some suggesting that everything would be more transparent if those media assumed a clear political position instead of a false independence.
News media tend to be critical of 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 news agency: there is a consistent suspicion that government tends to get better coverage by these media, because they depend directly on public funding. The Regulatory Entity for the Media (ERC) now systematically monitors the existence or absence of political pluralism in the PBS news bulletins, and has concluded that, during the past three years, there has tended to be some over-representation of the Government and of 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 (ERC 2009). The results of this monitoring activity are somehow ‘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”) to each political party.
