The broadcaster breaks records in October with a focus on new numbers and programs that combine events with political encounters and sometimes resemble the tone of Fox News, although tilted to the left: La 1’s dilemma: fishing for audience with events and politics or maintaining the type without falling into polarization | Television

Celtiberia show It’s burning. Delirious, hurt, restless, disoriented. The continuous threat of rupture, the tenuous line of parliamentary support for the Government, the constant feeling of instability, chronic uncertainty – that word that is already commonplace when you live in a Oh- caused in the media galaxy a tighten the lines and a bitter war left and right. Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE) took the lead with La 1, above all. Its leaders opted for a strategy of crushing, agitating and barricading. Legitimate? According to the logic of some audiovisual managers, total. From the space of a public service that must maintain balance and a dubious equidistance.

But the fact is that in this struggle for power everyone will burn their ships. We have a lot at stake in the next elections and they could take place at any time. Meanwhile, everything reeks of sloganeering in the private and public studios among those who are active on the right or lean to the left. From the offices of course. Among some of those who face the camera too. Javier Ruiz, the public channel’s last major hire, admitted to EL PAÍS: “I know I will go to the streets to save my principles”, he said. A sentence as clear as it is full of mystery.

I was tasked with sitting down and observing the La 1 grid and trying to understand the new logic that led the network and also the corporation to obtain great audience data over the last month. In the case of the first channel, 12.3%, the best October mark since 2011. Some clues to understand the recipe that makes this possible, that magic potion that brings them closer to a kind of phenomenon with current affairs like a bottomless pit. I observe aptitudes, styles, charisma, charms and disappointments… I discover a difficult relationship between substance and form. Something that governs aspects such as courtesy does not apply to media logic. And this now happens on some occasions with La 1.

I will connect soon. At eight in the morning we started with Silvia Intxaurrondo and an elegant proposal, without fuss or inflamed passions. The substance and form here do not creak and the data is consistent: this week, until Thursday, The hour of 1 had an average share of 18.5%, according to a ranking by consultancy Barlovento Comunicación based on measurements by Kantar Media. The growth in audience compared to last season is curious, when it averaged 13.8%. The program exudes a coherence that even attracts attention because it does not lack a taste for fighting. It goes well with coffee or gently follows your pulse when you go to the gym. The discussion table is balanced. She comments on the first information of the day and then completes with reactions to the interviews that she carries out with skill, patience and intention, as she demonstrated in front of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the last campaign.

Or as he did recently with the bone of Miriam Nogueras, the petty and stubborn Junts deputy in Madrid, who never left her mouth with abstruse arguments. Intxaurrondo armed himself with patience and helped the spectator through that ordeal like someone watching an excellent tennis player facing a wall.

The tone changes when it arrives Mornings 360. The hard drugs begin. A product full of the character that undoubtedly defines the new law of José Pablo López, president of RTVE and his management team. Adela González opens with a stomach-churning menu of events. They offer a portrait of a country besieged by crime, rape, fraud and citizens defenseless against all types of crimes.

For those who want to offer the image of a modern Spain, with good economic accounts, a healthy job market, technological commitments and commitments to sustainability or the fight against climate change, as the Government tells us, the panorama they paint of blood, primary impulses, unrestrained neo-Nazis in their attempt to take to the streets or crime, does not help the best image at the polls. It’s shabby, carpet-tonic, tribal, violent… Horrible. But in the eyes of those now directing the invention of television, it is a questionable strategy for engagement and then moving on to political meetings: the pulpit where the message is delivered.

In Mornings 360 The balance that Intxaurrondo previously offered is lost. Substance and form follow different paths. Political content adheres well to the facts. The PP and the extreme right provide a lot of material to fill the grid this autumn with the delirium of Mazón, the displays of Andalusia, the ridicule of their right-wing masters in the Senate, the adventures of Vito Quiles and his facha mariachis… But the meetings that address him in Mornings 360 They are taciturn, belligerent, unbalanced. The incessant labels make you dizzy and produce a back-and-forth lysergic effect.

Javier Ruiz doesn’t help with the balance either. He explains with some reason that what disarms are facts in the face of those who systematically irritate them with rumors and exaggerations. But his aggressive, emphatic, somewhat alarming and often biased style makes him a gifted student of Fox News for the left. Is this what RTVE managers are looking for now? A Fox News without rumors – to be clear –, with substance and content far from disinformation, but modeled on the North American network in its forms and flirting with polarization?

This may also explain its success with the public in the modern era. The numbers are clear with Morning 360: Since his return in September, he has had an average shareholding of 14.1%; Last season, until April, the average was 8.8% and after the incorporation of Javier Ruiz it increased to 10.6%. This also tells us that there is a public eager for scenarios in which the open defense of leftist positions predominates. This anti-Sanquism served in such a petty way builds voter loyalty on the left. It is easier and more decent to maintain progressive theses from a place contrary to the axis where what dominates as a political strategy is disinformation and hyperbole: a combination that defines the extreme right and seduces the PP as the most desperate path to taking power.

Thus, they place us in a constant dynamic of increasingly fanciful delusions. There is no way to enter into any constructive debate this way. Politics becomes a banal spectacle where leaders struggle to attract attention in the most bizarre ways. And then the images and statements on television go to the social media shredder.

It seems clear to La 1 that it has had to try to refute the ongoing toxicity emanating from the far right with arguments and proven facts, but with certain strategies like those adopted in certain programs, what often causes is not clarity and cleanliness, but rather more confusion. This is what it means to adopt a model more similar to that of Fox News than that of the BBC. It should be the opposite. Mainly in the public network and in these spaces. The news remains completely outside this trend and maintains its packaging.

Between the three o’clock news and the nine o’clock news more problems arise: Straight to the point (GIVE) and bad languages —which starts in La 2— follows the same frightening scheme. But the public also responds: since its debut, Straight to the point It has an average share of 10.8%, improving several points in a worn-out band that failed to find its way last season. AND bad languages reached 11.2% on average last month.

The two shows collide and produce quite a bit of horror in that moment. Even more so for those who grew up with a public screen where we spent our afternoons Bonanza to The Chiripitiflautians and Clowns on TV —in Franco’s time, it’s true, where the debate was not even contemplated—or already in the Transition and in the eighties of Falcon Crest, the fantastic car any Remington Steele to the wonderful irony of Sesame Street and The crystal ball so we don’t choke on our sandwich. I imagine any child coming home today… Surely they prefer to do their homework, no matter how hard it is, if their parents have La 1 connected. The point is not to go to bed with nightmares afterwards.

Marta Flich and Gonzalo Miró have a proposal with a formula that alternates the same thing: events, even with talk shows specializing in the subject, and politics to which they apply that permanent game of musical chairs that exists in this country between analysts of the national and global panorama. Always the same. The systematic effect of Groundhog Day.

One request: that warning sound that destroys nap time is quite annoying. The presenters, on the other hand, with Flich’s undeniable charm, above all, instill more caution, a sense of humor and a measured attitude than Ruiz or whoever comes later: Jesús Cintora with his bad languages He appears surrounded by voices among which there is an abundance of nostalgia for 68 and a certain dogmatic orthodoxy that makes even some agree with a more than clueless idea about some authoritarian elements without the 21st century having yet reached their heads.

bad languages It is the daily culmination of a polarized dynamic in which dense analyses, populist emphasis and a hysterical vision of current events prevail, with which La 1 has entered a very dark spiral at times when it is difficult to calm the waters of the storm.