Pedro Sanchez's 'Gag Plan' imitates Franco's and Putin's measures to control the media

Yesterday I commented here on the cynicism of calling measures to limit freedom of information an "Action Plan for Democracy."

Former deputy director of El País reveals Pedro Sánchez's pressures on journalists
Sánchez leads an organization with 11 partners who emerged from single parties of dictatorships

A 'Gag Plan' that includes a media registry

Today, the coalition government formed by socialists and communists has made it even clearer that the plan announced yesterday by Sánchez is not democratic, but a display of authoritarianism: a "Gag Plan" to intimidate journalists investigating socialist corruption scandals. It is enough to observe one of the measures announced today by the Spanish executive to realize its intentions: the creation of a media registry under the pretext of "guaranteeing greater transparency and independence in the media."

This pretext is already an exercise in cynicism, since the government is going to demand from the media two things that the executive itself does not do, since it is colonizing independent institutions by putting socialists in charge. On the other hand, Sánchez's government is the most opaque in our democracy, systematically rejecting requests for public information to which Spaniards have a right to access.

Franco's dictatorship created a register of journalists to control them

The closest thing we have had in Spain to the measure announced today by the Sánchez government was Decree 744/1967 of the Ministry of Information of the Franco regime which created an "Official Registry of Journalists" with the excuse of set "the rights and duties of journalists and especially of the Director of all information media." It is curious to see that the Sánchez government, which uses Franco as a wild card to demonize the right, is now imitating measures of that dictatorship to curtail freedom of information.

During the dictatorship, registration in this registry was a requirement to be able to work as a journalist under the dictatorship. Now, Sánchez's government is going one step further and justifying its registration by claiming that it seeks to "establish the criteria that define what a media outlet is, among other platforms, whose purpose is not to inform". In short: just like under Franco, political power will be the one to decide who has the right to inform and who does not. A deeply anti-democratic measure with which Sánchez puts Spain on the path of socialist dictatorships like Venezuela (is that why the Spanish socialist leader has never called the Maduro regime a "dictatorship"?).

Roskomnadzor, the media registry of Putin's dictatorship

It should be noted that the Official Register of Journalists under Franco was abolished in 1982. Currently in Europe, the closest thing to the register planned by Sánchez is the Putin dictatorship’s Roskomnadzor, a mandatory register of media outlets whose purpose is to monitor the activity of journalists in Russia by the state. In 2014, this register was also extended to blogs with more than 3,000 readers. Violators (i.e. those who practice journalism without being registered) face heavy fines.

For the moment, the intention of Sánchez's government seems to be to penalize the media through discrimination, preventing access to public aid or institutional advertising to those that the government considers "pseudo-media" (that is, media that are bothersome to Sánchez). It is a way of giving a clear advantage to sympathetic media at the expense of taxpayers, but above all, what Sánchez seeks is to discredit in advance any media that is not to his liking, making advertisers avoid it for fear of government reprisals. This is how a dictatorship is born.

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Photo: PSOE.