"Politics is becoming less and less important and should be limited to newsrooms." The interim director of TV3, Sigfrid Gras, was so forceful yesterday in the control committee of the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation of the Parliament. This line of work implies a Copernican turn in the trajectory of the last decade of Catalan public television, marked by the process and the growing politicization of the whole grid.
To questions from the socialist deputy Beatriz Silva, who questioned the recent interview on the FAQS program with former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, hardly justifiable from the point of view of the PSC spokesperson, Gras admitted that politically it could be debatable but that journalistically it was not. Not at all. When the possibility was raised, just two days before its broadcast, there were no doubts about it: "Villarejo hadn't spoken for five years and everyone was looking for him," he argued.
Despite the criminal history and the unreliability of the interviewee, who is on provisional release, the acting director of TV3 insisted on the timeliness of the interview and exhibited a large press dossier to highlight the repercussion it had had on the other media. communication.
“Everyone knows that Villarejo constantly lies and that he aims to destabilize the rule of law, now with a strategy of togas control to avoid a new conviction,” Silva returned, criticizing the almost three hours for being excessive. in the prime-time slot, in which the former commissioner was live on screen.
Gras acknowledged that the interview was "too long" (two hours and twenty minutes removing the advertising, he qualified) and took the opportunity to announce that TV3 is working to "change this line little by little" and "depoliticize" the television grid.
Regarding the plurality of the gatherings and the presence of Spanish in the programming, Gras was much more conciliatory than his predecessor in office, Vicent Sanchis, and assured that, although TV3 aims to promote Catalan, no one is discriminated against collaborator or expert for reasons of language: “We do not want to marginalize anyone at all for not speaking Catalan. We provide all the means so that the guests feel as comfortable as possible, ”he replied to Anna Grau, from Ciudadanos, who had reproached him for his own absence from the sets for more than a year.
