34 twentyfoursevenvalencia
COMMENT
The Times They Aren’t A-Changing This month you’ll see the streets of Valencia filled with large smiley faces bearing down on you in Big Brother style as the regional elections are fought out. One of the faces that you’ll also see incessantly on the regional public TV channel is the president of the Valencia region, though suspiciously you won’t see nearly so much of his competitors. The channel allegedly owes Valencian audiovisual companies 20 million euros and has twice the staff of Tele 5 and Antena 3 (national TV channels) put together. And it’s still crap, in my opinion. The nearest thing to the BBC in Spain for me is the Catalan TV channel, TV3, which has recently been forced to stop transmitting to this region, thereby depriving many like myself of their main source of information as to what’s actually going on in Valencia. These tactics come as no surprise from the political party which, when in power in the national government, named as chairman of national public TV the same man who went on to become their party’s spokesperson. Can you imagine the British Conservative Party naming as chairman of the BBC the same man they then choose to be their spokesperson?
It never ceases to amaze and depress me that people aren’t outraged by such abuse of the media and clumsy propaganda in a country that has suffered a long dictatorship and which therefore must have seen it all before. Here are some examples. When the vice-president of the Valencia region was finally forced to resign after being implicated in the ‘Orange Market’ scandal, the media flocked like vultures from all over Spain to see his resignation speech. (The case involved powerful politicians from the same political party allegedly siphoning off huge amounts of public money by dividing up government contracts so they weren’t open for public tender. Even the national party’s treasurer’s name appeared and he, too, resigned.) That day I tuned into the regional public television channel to see how they’d portray the situation. My jaw hit the floor as I heard their headline for that day’s news: “It’s sunny in Benidorm.” The Valencian president has been summoned to answer for the same sordid case, with the same channel saying that he’s “helping the judges clear the matter up.”
In the province of Castellón the same party has for president a man infamous for the statistically impossible but criminally plausible feat of allegedly winning the lottery nine times, amid many other dubious claims to fame. His family has been in power in the area literally for centuries, including the Franco period. You may have been perplexed to see the name of Castellón Airport on the Villarreal football team’s shirt, since there aren’t actually any planes there despite the construction allegedly costing over 150 million euros. However, this didn’t stop him and the Valencian president inaugurating it as part of the pre-election campaign with the local television channel there to report it. The town council of Villarreal itself planned an open day in April for a new library that doesn’t happen to have any books in it. And let’s not forget the Valencia region’s other province, Alicante. Perhaps the most famous example of corruption scandal here is the so-called ‘Brugal’ case. It’s a fact that lemon orchards are not particularly profitable these days, but some entrepreneurs seem to have got together to make money out of them anyway. Here’s how. They purportedly pocketed public money for treating Article © 2011 24/7Valencia