Joao Soares will have the protection of RTP – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
 

The new Minister of Culture, João Soares, will have the protection of RTP, RDP and Lusa. The information was given this Wednesday to Lusa by the nominated prime minister, António Costa, who thus confirms that his government will be the first to place public media in dependence of Culture for assumed programmatic option.

The PS’s electoral program already foresaw this scenario, although talk of integration “in the sphere of culture” and not assert categorically that RTP would be organically under the Ministry of Culture.

And the solution now announced, also point is that the finance of public media companies will be monitored by the Secretary of State with the supervision of the Treasury, Ricardo Mourinho Félix, a deputy elected by Setúbal which is considered the right-hand of Finance Minister Mario Centeno.

This integration of RTP in the protection has always been defended by Manuel Maria Carrilho, the Prime Minister António Guterres culture, but would only happen sporadically in the summer of 2001, when Augusto Santos Silva in the second government Guterres, transferred from the Education folder for Culture, which replaced José Sasportes.

And it was for circumstantial reasons, and not in compliance with an assumed programmatic option. When the Minister of the Presidency, Guilherme d’Oliveira Martins, also took over the portfolio of Finance, the Secretary of State for the Media, Alberto Arons de Carvalho, who was then under his tutelage, went to the dependence of Culture.

Silva Santos would eventually be only a few months in office, as the government would fall in April 2002, and the Minister of Barroso Culture, Pedro Roseta, no longer kept the tutelage of RTP, as would not have Maria John Bustorff, the government of Santana Lopes. And in the later socialist government led by José Socrates, the public media has been reporting directly to the minister of Parliamentary Affairs, first Augusto Santos Silva, between 2005 and 2009 – thus recovering the tutelage of RTP, but in another folder – and then Jorge Lacão, 2009-2011.

In the coalition government PSD / CDS, led by Pedro Passos Coelho, the sector has to dependence on deputy ministers of Prime Minister, having first been tutored by Miguel Relvas and then by Miguel Poiares Maduro.

This is because the first time the public media is placed depending on the culture minister for basic political option, taken on a government program that devotes several paragraphs of its strategy for Culture to RTP and audiovisual industry in general, as well as new media and gives some concrete promises in this area, such as to ensure the “full access open signal to all public service channels through digital terrestrial television” .

You electoral program, which in the culture sector was recovered unchanged in the current document consensualizado with BE and the PCP, the PS proposed to “affirm the RTP as media public service tool, valuing [their] educational and cultural dimension, “and assure him” an important role in cultural policies and the audiovisual and technological innovation and multi-platform offering. “

The government program proposed was further “enhance the role of the RTP file in the promotion of our collective memory”, “strengthen the role of RTP as funding for film and audiovisual works” and “broaden the provision of program services through Digital Terrestrial Television”.

Strengthening the “legal framework on the transparency and concentration of ownership” is another priority assumed in the program, with the aim of imposing a “transparency regime” enabling “identification of the entire chain entities with qualifying holdings in the media “and determine” effective obligation of accountability showing the movement of capital of all media groups operating in Portugal. “

In terms of business media, promises to “review the ERC funding model to ensure their independence from political power.”