Madrid’s media bubble and liberals with a trick up their sleeve

In Madrid, a purported paradise of freedom, the media are flourishing: they are born, they grow and they reproduce at an unparalleled speed. This is the view held by liberal theories, which place the press as a key element of democracy, as the Fourth Estate that supervises the other powers and facilitates authentic public debate. And Madrid, as a supposed liberal laboratory, appears to confirm it with a veritable explosion of media outlets.

Here’s the problem: most of these outlets also proclaim themselves to be liberal, just like the regional government on which they depend for their survival, and they are in wild competition with one another to see who is tougher on Spain’s progressive national government and who bestows the most praise on the model embraced by Madrid regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the Popular Party (PP). It’s clear that something doesn’t add up.

Inside this Madrid media bubble, it is simply impossible to understand why Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party (PSOE) and his henchmen are not already in jail. And it’s not just the traditional right-wing media who are helping impose this framework, but also, and mostly, a gigantic army of digital media outlets that were created in different waves aligned with — and fed by — the great power base of the conservative PP since 2003, when Esperanza Aguirre achieved the regional presidency thanks to the tamayazo — a political scandal named after Eduardo Tamayo, who along with another PSOE lawmaker in the Madrid assembly prevented his party’s candidate from becoming regional premier through their abstention at the investiture vote, triggering a new election that was won by the PP’s Aguirre.

It is not easy to find a large traditional media outlet in Madrid that has not suffered a split on its right side during this period, with the participation at the highest level, even by former editors rebelling against their organization’s alleged betrayals and excessive appeasement of the left, despite the fact that the positions of these traditional outlets remain, in general terms, the same as they have always been.

Federico Jiménez Losantos got the ball rolling in the late 2000s when he broke with the Cope network and built a universe of trenches around Libertad Digital, EsDiario and EsRadio. But the same thing has happened in almost all other outlets: here at EL PAÍS, the bulk of the editorial board under former editor-in-chief Antonio Caño is now at The Objective, where they revolt against “the coup d’état.” And the former editor-in-chief of Abc, Bieito Rubido, now leads El Debate, promoted by the Catholic Association of Propagandists.

But the most impressive case of multiplication is El Mundo, which for years was the biggest scourge of progressive governments. Today, the newspaper maintains the same belligerent attitude it always did — now applauded by the historic members of the PSOE who once ironically called it “El Inmundo” (the Filthy One) — but it has to compete with no fewer than five projects launched by former editors-in-chief that amplify its conservative tradition in all its nuances. Some of them aspire to be a newspaper of record: El Español, headed by Pedro J. Ramírez, and El Independiente, by Casimiro García Abadillo, two men who were once El Mundo’s historical management duo, now in competition with each other; others try to be an amplifying vehicle for underground parapolice operations ― Okdiario, run by Eduardo Inda and Periodista Digital, by Alfonso Rojo ― and yet others engage in agitation, as illustrated by Eda, headed by Javier Negre.

Contained within one of these three frameworks — aspiring to be the newspaper of record, conveyance of shady material or an explicit desire for agitation — an enormous number of media outlets that make up this liberal media bubble with ties to the PP or to Vox has been proliferating in recent years in Madrid. With few exceptions, they all share several characteristics: opacity in the makeup of capital and the origin of revenues; and a business model in which subscriptions are residual and are instead focused entirely on attracting advertising.

The explosion of self-proclaimed liberal and advertising-dependent media has occurred in an extremely adverse market context for this type of project, with conventional advertisers fleeing from these offers and overwhelmingly focusing on social media and internet search engines. It is a global trend, but in Spain it has had an even more brutal impact on media accounts due to the general delay in building subscriber communities to help provide additional revenue.

The data are overwhelming: according to calculations by the Publishers Association, advertising in the press sector in Spain — including digital outlets — has sunk from €1.9 billion in 2007 to just €733 million in 2022, while the amount earmarked for social media and search engines rose from €396 million to €3 billion in the same period.

That is to say: total advertising for the press — the sum of paper and digital formats — has plummeted more than 60% in 15 years, coinciding with the hyperinflation of new media outlets whose business model is based precisely on competing for said dwindling advertising: much less money to be distributed among many more outlets.

An “opaque and arbitrary” model

How to explain such a miracle in Madrid? In the opinion of experts, the key element is the distribution of public advertising which, unlike conventional advertising, not only has not fled the sector but has even increased, occasionally in order to “feed friendly media with a very high degree of opacity,” according to Miguel Álvarez-Peralta, a professor of communication at Rey Juan Carlos University and co-author of a research paper on the subject published in 2021 in Spanish Transparency Magazine. The study shows that the trend is similar throughout Spain. The same conclusion was reached by a recent large-scale academic project led by Isabel Fernández Alonso, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

However, the Madrid region is in the leading group both in terms of public advertising spending and opacity in distribution, based on the objective indicators under analysis, as evidenced by Álvarez-Peralta’s research. Raúl Magallón Rosa of Carlos III University, member of the national project led by Isabel Fernández, and author of the article La publicidad institucional en la Comunidad de Madrid (Institutional advertising in the Region of Madrid), has reached the same conclusion. He underscores “opacity and arbitrariness” as determining features of the Madrid model. A good part of his work consisted of highlighting the difficulties in accessing information, as well as the complete lack of cooperation from regional authorities in this endeavor.

Madrid stands out in opacity, arbitrariness and also in the large amount of resources it allocates to institutional advertising, with allocations that are only comparable to those of Catalonia. In 2022, the Catalan government invested €34.5 million in media ads, while the Madrid government spent €27.5 million, a stratospheric jump compared to the €12.1 million it spent in 2020, as denounced in the regional assembly by the Más Madrid lawmaker Eduardo Gutiérrez.

The lawmaker warns that, in reality, the Madrid figure is much higher than the official one, because the advertising allocations of autonomous public entities such as the water supply operator Canal de Isabel II, which historically has budgets worth millions of euros for this purpose, are left out of the formal calculation and have no oversight. Gutiérrez, who has presented several parliamentary questions to try to shed some light on this agency’s advertising hole, summarizes the situation by recalling a phrase that EL PAÍS attributed to Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, the guru of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and, before that, of former conservative prime minister José María Aznar: “It is not necessary to buy a media outlet. It is enough to be their best customer.”

The comparison of Madrid’s advertising spending with that of Catalonia during the regional government’s separatist drive, so harshly denounced by Madrid officials, is not in fact accurate: the situation in Madrid is even worse, since in Catalonia, every year, an official report comes out showing the total amount received by each media outlet, down to the last cent. The Madrid region is at the opposite end: it is impossible to know where even a single cent of such a huge advertising investment went.

Quique Badia Massoni, a journalist from the Daniel Jones group at the UAB, has managed to compile advertising investment data between 2013 and 2020 from the city councils of Barcelona and Madrid and has found significant differences between the approach of the political right and the left in both capitals, which both experienced turns in power during this period, which facilitates the comparison: from Convergence and Union (CiU) to the Commons in Barcelona, and from the PP to Ahora Madrid and back to the PP in Madrid. Badia has identified two significant differences: the right spends more on institutional advertising than the left and, in addition, aims it more towards the media, to the detriment of other forms of communication that are booming in the market, such as social media and search engines.

Regarding investment, the researcher calculates that the governments of former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, of the left-wing Catalonia in Common, spent on average 34% less on institutional advertising compared to the period headed by her predecessor, Xavier Trias of the nationalist coalition CiU. In Madrid, the reduction with Mayor Manuela Carmena, of the left-wing platform Ahora Madrid, was 28% both compared with her predecessor, Ana Botella of the PP, and with the first full year of her successor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida of the PP, who raised it again.

Meanwhile, both the Colau and Carmena administrations very significantly expanded advertising in social media, an option that in the cases of Trias, Botella and Almeida is barely symbolic, notes Badia, who concludes: “The left usually pursues a more efficient use of advertising investment so that it reaches the audiences that the campaigns are directed at, while the right seems to prioritize media financing.”

The paradoxical left

The parameters to define this supposed “efficiency” are, therefore, vital to the extent that they also guide the institutional advertising criteria of the central government, which, in 2023, amounted to €145 million. These are metrics established by technocrats and managers from the world of advertising that do not take into account the social and political role of the media in a democracy, and which ignore crucial aspects such as plurality, diversification of revenue sources, the construction of communities that can contribute to financing the media outlet, or respect for deontological criteria, among others.

In practice, then, the criteria used by the right when it governs — increasing the budget to distribute advertising money opaquely and without accountability — benefits its friendly media, while those on the left seem to say: “It’s the market, my friend!”

Such objective criteria, strict and often merely quantitative, mean that even the institutional advertising of a progressive government can end up feeding above all the right-wing media, which paradoxically cry out loudly every time these budget items increase even as they become their main beneficiaries. It is enough to take a look at them to realize that their main advertiser is usually the central government: without this advertising, the vast majority of these outlets, which are generally in a very precarious financial situation, would be heading directly towards bankruptcy.

Right-wing media benefit more from these supposedly objective criteria to the extent that they tend to rely on models that seek to reach massive audiences, very often through techniques and tricks that have nothing to do with quality journalism, such as clickbait. On the other hand, many progressive media have prioritized the construction of a subscriber base, which is usually to the detriment of mass audiences by including some type of paywall.

Among traditional newspapers, EL PAÍS, with more than 300,000 digital subscribers, has more subscribers than its three Madrid competitors combined — El Mundo, Abc and La Razón. And among digital natives, elDiario.es, with more than 70,000 members, has more subscribers than the half-a-dozen projects led by former editors of El Mundo, Abc and EL PAÍS combined, while Infolibre has consolidated itself with nearly 15,000 despite being excluded from the distribution of funds by the Madrid regional government.

On the other hand, the newspaper with the largest official audience in Spain, according to the GKF reference meter, is El Español headed by Pedro J. Ramírez with no fewer than 16.6 million unique users, at the head of a top ten in which Okdiario, by Eduardo Inda, also occupies a preferential spot — seventh — with 12 million: these figures guarantee them revenue from advertising campaigns run by progressive administrations based on objective criteria.

This dynamic of seeking massive audiences to attract institutional advertising in a market where conventional advertising is fleeing to other formats, is what many of the new media outlets in the Madrid liberal media bubble are following.

It is a scenario of a Darwinian struggle for existence, in which the search for scarce food leads to an increasing dependence on the Administration: it is a circle that ends up harming journalism — whether due to its proximity to political power or the type of content rigged to be clickbait — that amplifies the noise and increases the dimensions of the bubble.

A bubble, yes, with its own dynamics, very noisy, but with feet of clay and very far removed from the reality that exists outside, as demonstrated by a macro survey with more than 27,000 interviews conducted by the pollster CIS last October. It turns out that almost no one cited these media outlets with theoretically super-massive audiences as a regular source of information.

In the macro-survey, only 1.2% of press readers pointed to El Español as their outlet of preference to obtain information, and 1.7% to Okdiario, despite their theoretically massive audiences. Those figures are a far cry from the 25% that cited EL PAÍS and even the 5.8% who mentioned elDiario.es.

Madrid’s liberal media bubble has a trick up its sleeve and it is looking more and more like its Catalan separatist nemesis: it is opaque, it depends on public money and it shouts a lot, yet is heard less and less in real life.

Pere Rusiñol is a journalist and co-editor of ‘Alternativas económicas’ and ‘Mongolia.’

This article was originally published in Spanish as an advance from the January issue of ‘TintaLibre’ magazine, available in Spain. Readers who wish to subscribe to EL PAÍS in conjunction with ‘TintaLibre’ can do so through this link.

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