Abstract
For thirteen consecutive years, Catalan public broadcasting journalists have protested against the so-called coverage quotas established by Spanish electoral regulations. According to those regulations, during election campaigns, broadcasters are required to use a calculated number related to the proportion of votes cast in the previous election to determine the amount of broadcast time they allot to each party. Journalists have repeatedly and publicly complained about the quotas, while simultaneously explaining the effects of the quotas to the audience and not crediting authorship of this news. This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of the case and its historical roots from different angles: the protests, the journalists’ professional roles, the political parties’ strategies, the roles of the regulatory boards and the initiatives taken by some professional organizations and institutions. The theoretical framework focuses on the mistrust between the political class and journalists in the context of a mediatized conflict with ethical implications. The methodology includes extensive document examination, news content analysis and interviews. The results indicate that the Spanish political class has deemed the performance of the Catalan public broadcaster as tending to equate political information with electoral spots controlled by parties. The consequence of this has been an enduring conflict between politicians and Catalan journalists that distances citizens from both of them.
 Keywords: Spanish public media, media conflict, journalistic-political conflict, politics and ethics in media.
Highlights
For the first time in thirteen years of protests, some Catalan public broadcasting channels1 tested the action of not implementing the blocks system in the campaign for the 26 June 2016 general election2
This paper examines the roots of the political and media conflict, which involves the ethical decisions of both groups, journalists and politicians, in the sense that the former do not assume responsibility for the information broadcast and the latter apply political control over that information
The managers of Catalan public media who have defended criteria of independence and informative neutrality do not need to be overseen by political representatives, who are sometimes the same people who are in charge of the corresponding electoral campaign.”
Summary
For the first time in thirteen years of protests, some Catalan public broadcasting channels tested the action of not implementing the blocks system in the campaign for the 26 June 2016 general election. At the intersection between media ethics and political communication lie the power of media and their message on creating trust in people and institutions (Gross, Aday and Brewer 2004), and the extent of the media’s impact on people’s participation It has been a constant debate in communication studies in the last 30 years and is emerging once again in the digital age (Ceron 2015). The study focuses on contextual elements in the Catalan case to assess the way in which the journalists’ protests have evolved from their origins, and to observe how the institutions involved (such as political parties, electoral boards, broadcasting boards) have kept the conflict alive for thirteen years. It is possible to find some studies that analyse journalists’ strikes, for example how citizens’ identify with newspaper strikes (Moy, McCoy, Spratt and McCluskey 2003) and different protests in North America (Demers 2006, Neilson 2012, Cohen 2014), but none of them is involved with protests against electoral laws
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