1 Introduction
It is widely accepted that Spain is a country with a high degree of parallelism between media and politics. Political parallelism, as defined by Hallin and Mancini (2004), refers to the links between political actors and media actors, or, more precisely, the extent to which media reflects political divisions and struggles. In southern European countries, high political parallelism produces a media system that is extremely polarized – as political systems have been in the region – and instrumentalized. In Spain, this political polarization and instrumentalization of the media system meant for a long time that the mainstream media followed the bipartisan model of the political system, with outlets backing one of the two main political parties which alternated power and generated strong clientelistic ties (Fernández-Quijada and Arboledas, 2013). This changed in 2014, when new political parties emerged that embodied more radical positions on the left and the right than the two larger mainstream parties.
This new scenario transformed Spanish politics into a much more fragmented arena for the first time since the end of the Francoist regime in 1975, ending bipartisanship and bringing the political system closer to the diverse sociological reality of the country. However, the media system did not adapt to this reality since only the new right wing parties’ views were incorporated into the mainstream media. By the end of 2017, for instance, the political views of citizens represented by 31.3 per cent of the members of the Spanish Parliament (who had voted for left wing Podemos or for pro-independence Catalan parties) were not reflected in the Spanish mainstream media. Therefore, political parallelism theory seems to collapse in Spain during this process.
The turbulence and dysfunction experienced by the Spanish media system since the recovery of democracy is the necessary beginning for any understanding of Grupo Prisa (Promotora de Informaciones S.A.), the media group to which this volume is devoted. A flagship brand of the democratic restoration in Spain, Prisa’s birth, success, and decline meticulously reflects the Spanish media system’s – and the whole country’s – developments and struggles, including the communication policy and the liberalization of the broadcasting market. There is no way of deciphering Prisa’s history if we omit the Spanish political peculiarities of the period or the political turmoil, such as the attempted coup d’état in 1981.
Hence, El País, Grupo Prisa’s first and still most influential media asset, was the first pro-democracy newspaper within a context where all the other Spanish newspapers were influenced by Franco’s ideology. However, the company founded to launch the newspaper was, and still is, far from being detached from the dictator’s legacy. The newspaper, much like the whole group, was also born bearing the standard of journalistic independence and democratic responsibility. Yet, the fast and hazardous corporate growth the company has experienced is irresistibly linked to the particular version of financialization taking place in the Spanish economy, which has proven to be particularly harmful for journalistic independence and democratic values.
For this very reason, Grupo Prisa’s history perfectly mirrors the specificities of the restored democracy in Spain, which, as in other southern European countries, has huge democratic deficits because of their recent authoritarian past. Prisa’s corporate history, as with Spain’s recent history, has plenty of ups and downs, including undemocratic taboos, political partisanship and clientelism, financial irrationality, power struggles, patriotism, and authoritarian neoliberalism.
The Neoliberal Storm and the Case of Spain
In the late twentieth century, the vested interests of media organizations and the corporate system were transformed by the financialization of capitalism, pushed forward by neoliberal proponents. As media corporations became absorbed by financial capitalism, their ownership structures concentrated further in an environment of greater instability and competitiveness. Consequently, news content became further distanced from its social responsibility criteria. The media’s investigative and watchdog role was thereby radically diminished.
At the global level, media corporation links with the financial system made it difficult for journalists to denounce the 2007–2008 global financial crisis that began in the United States, and later spread to Europe and the rest of the world. At the Spanish level, Grupo Prisa is a unique example of this perfect storm that financialization produced by pushing financial interests into the media corporations, thus undermining the capacity of journalists to warn of the increasing weakness of an economic system based on finance rather than on real output.
Financialization, the increasing dominance of finance over the real economy, added to the problems of Western media systems – mostly commoditization and concentration – and its consequences are highly visible in the Spanish media system. Since the old fascist regime ended, most of the mainstream media in Spain have belonged to four big Spanish conglomerates: Grupo Prisa, Grupo Vocento, Grupo Planeta, and Telefónica. Two large Italian holding companies, Grupo Mediaset and RCS MediaGroup, were also involved in broadcasting and press, respectively. And two small Catalan groups, Grupo Godó and Grupo Zeta, published the two newspapers of record in Barcelona. All of them, without exception, hold strong ties with the corporate and financial elite. During the period of time we track in this volume for Prisa, all parent companies of the Spanish mainstream media were closely involved with the banking system through ownership, representation on boards of directors, and/or debt. Thus, several parent companies of the Spanish mainstream media (Prisa, Vocento, Mediaset, RCS) had stockholders from all of the top Spanish banking entities, international banks, and investment or hedge funds.
Grupo Prisa, for example, had a London hedge fund as the majority stockholder at least from 2016 to 2020. Some directors of the parent companies also served on the boards of other companies listed on the IBEX 35, the main stock market index of the Madrid Stock Exchange, during that period. Godó’s chairman, for instance, was director of Caixa Bank, Planeta’s chairman was director of Banco Sabadell, and Vocento’s chairman was also director of the major Spanish construction company Ferrovial. Every parent company of Spanish mainstream media organizations had financial debts that compromised their business to a greater or lesser extent. In the case of Prisa, for instance, the impact of its debt brought about changes in its board of directors, who have been increasingly replacing independent directors with representatives of financial investors and creditors.
Of course, as mentioned, the links of the Spanish mainstream media with the financial and business elite are not their only feature. The origins of the Prisa, Vocento, Planeta, and Godó groups are clearly located in the old regime, with founders (or their descendants) maintaining control until the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
In the case of Prisa, the founding family still retained a very important stake in the company’s ownership as of 2020 – even if its equity share went down to 7.6 per cent. It is worth remembering that the founder, Jesús Polanco, was a successful, Catholic, Falangist entrepreneur in the Franco’s regime (Cabrera, 2015). He hired Juan Luis Cebrián as the editor in chief of El País at the end of the dictatorship (1975) because the latter had the “perfect pedigree” for the Francoist leaders attempting to direct the political transition (Seoane and Sueiro, 2004: 53).
In Grupo Vocento, a conglomerate created after the merger of two centenary media groups (Grupo Correo and Prensa Española), it was still possible in 2020 to find the founding family within the ownership structure. The creator of ABC newspaper, Torcuato Luca de Tena, was a Catholic, pro-monarchy, Spanish patriot who combined his political stance with the editorial line of the newspaper. ABC was embedded into the so-called Prensa del Movimiento during Franco’s dictatorship. The Prensa del Movimiento was the only legally allowed Spanish journalistic group during Franco’s dictatorship and belonged to the regime’s only party, the Falange Española de las JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista). The founders of ABC were awarded aristocratic titles by King Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) in 1929 and King Juan Carlos I (1938–) in 2003, including the highest such title in Spain (Grande de España).
Grupo Planeta is still owned by the Lara family. Its founder, José Manuel Lara Hernández (1914–2003), also held an aristocratic title (Marqués de Pedroso), granted by the King of Spain, and participated in the Spanish Civil War on the Francoist side. At the end of the war, he entered Barcelona as captain of the Spanish legion and actively participated in the political repression in Catalonia. Lara Hernández became head of the Vertical Union of Graphic Arts, the only legal union, which was controlled by the Francoist regime during the dictatorship (EL PAÍS, 2003).
Grupo Godó is grounded in the century-old newspaper La Vanguardia, which was also embedded in the Prensa del Movimiento under Franco. The strong and public support of Javier Godó (1941–), the owner of the group, for the Spanish monarchy is well known. Like the founders of Vocento, he belongs to the Spanish aristocracy through two titles, Count and Grande de España, both awarded by the former King of Spain Juan Carlos I.
Telefónica is the biggest telecommunications company in Spain, with an outstanding presence in Latin America. The company was created in Madrid in 1924 as Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España (CTNE), with ITT as one of its major shareholders. It became mainly public in 1945 under Franco’s dictatorship. The liberalization of the telecommunication market in the 1990s led to the complete privatization of the company. Telefónica operates pay-TV in Spain and Latin America through the brand Movistar+, and in Brazil through Vivo TV. As we will mention in Chapter 2, Telefónica’s presence in the pay-TV market in Spain is profoundly linked to Prisa.
Mediaset Spa is an Italian media group active in the television sector, audio-visual production, and the Internet. In particular, it controls the first private television channels in Italy: Canale 5, Italia 1, and Rete 4. The group is associated with Silvio Berlusconi (1936–) and his family, the main shareholder through its holding company Fininvest (which also has a controlling interest in Mondadori, the most important publishing group in Italy). In Spain, Mediaset, whose trade name is Mediaset España Comunicación, is a media group created in March 1989. Its main activity is the production and exhibition of television content. It currently operates the free-to-air television channels Telecinco, Cuatro, Factoría de Ficción, Boing, Divinity, Energy, and Be Mad. It also owns several companies as part of its business group, including the news agency Atlas, the advertising manager Publiespaña, and the film and television audio-visual production company Telecinco Cinema. In 2019, Mediaset España and Mediaset Spa announced their merged into MFE NV (Media For Europe).
Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera MediaGroup (RCS MediaGroup) is an Italian holding company owner of daily newspapers and magazines, as well as radio and television broadcasting. It is also active in the sale and distribution of advertising. Its newspaper titles include Corriere della Sera (published since 1876) and La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy. In Spain, RCS MediaGroup has the newspapers El Mundo, Marca (sports), and Expansión (business); magazines like Yo Donna, Telva, Marca Motor, Actualidad Económica, Fuera de Serie, and Diario Médico; the radio network Radio Marca (sports); and the licence of two free-to-air television channels (Veo TV).
All of this is relevant to understanding the values which complement financial capitalism and neoliberalism within the Spanish media system. The links with financial capitalism cannot by themselves explain the shortcomings of the Spanish mainstream media during the period; the political legacy of the old regime must be also taken into account. The same links are found everywhere in financialized capitalist democracies. However, the Spanish mainstream media groups’ historic links with the old regime are a peculiarity of the Spanish media system.
Spanish capitalism is dominated by a narrow circle of descendants from the former Francoist oligarchy. Across the media system, financial debt prevented the media groups that have emerged after the democratic transition from escaping this pattern.
Grupo Prisa and Plan for the Book
Prisa’s corporate behaviour and unfolding since its birth in 1972 until 2020 is probably among the most revealing examples of how neoliberalism and financialization promote and increase the weakening of social and corporate responsibility – and thus the weakening of democratic values.
In spite of having a larger number of shareholders at its birth and a hedge fund in control of the major portion of its ownership at the end of the studied period in this volume, the group was under the control of two men alone for its initial four decades of life: first under Jesús Polanco’s hand, who managed to become the major stockholder until his death in 2007, and until 2018, under Juan Luis Cebrián’s ruling, who raised the banking debt of the group to an impossible pay back (more than five billion euros at the highest point) and still mana...
