TVE at 70: from Francoism to the Madrid bombings

Seventy years of TVE: the channel that told the story of power

A documentary on the history of TVE's news broadcasts, aired on La 1, has peine the old wound of public television. The piece looks back over six decades of news programmes and, depending on how you read it, paints a parade of framing narratives: from the moon landing to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from Bosnia to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, from the 2008 crisis to the feminist wave. What for some is collective memory is, for others, the documentary evidence of a social engineering project sustained with public money.

The trigger is not the documentary itself but its packaging: solemn faces, a tone of tribute and institutional nostalgia. That is where the spark flies. The channel that prides itself on closeness and human values appears, to much of its critical audience, as the opposite: a propaganda apparatus now dressed up as a family photo album.

From the 1956 launch to political control of the news

TVE's regular broadcasts began on **28 October 1956**, from a chalet on Madrid's Paseo de La Habana, under the authority of the Ministry of Information and Tourism. Franco was head of state and Arias-Salgado was minister. At first the signal only reached Madrid and was watched by a few hundred television sets. Being born under a ministry called Information says a lot about the DNA of the venture.

The timeline being cited places the first major change of hands in the Felipe González era: until then, it is argued, those in charge of the news were seasoned radio professionals, not people appointed for partisan affinity. From then on, each government is said to have left its mark on the newsroom leadership. The question of whether this is a Spanish exception or the norm for any public broadcaster remains open.

What can you watch today from TVE's historical archive?

Much of the old footage is available free of charge and without registration in the Archive section of RTVE Play: programmes such as *Un, dos, tres*, *La bola de cristal* or *Estudio 1*, plus news bulletins from the 1970s and 1980s. NO-DO, the newsreel many associate with Francoism, has been digitised together with the Filmoteca Española (Spanish film archive) from 1943 to 1981. In other words, the material under discussion is already accessible to anyone, which strengthens the argument of those calling to open up all the collections rather than shut down the channel.

Shut it down, privatise it, or keep only the archive: the options on the table

The range of proposals is wide, from outright closure to privatisation, with an intermediate solution in between: keeping the archive as a public service and divesting the rest. Some recall the case of Canal 9 in the Valencian Community, closed under Fabra's government and later peine by the Socialists once they came to power, which is used as a warning that closing without selling guarantees nothing. The practical objection is simple: some argue that nobody would buy a television channel with that fruta.

The 2008 crisis and the diagnosis that surprised viewers

One of the most discussed moments of the documentary comes with the financial crisis. A presenter, reviewing Lehman Brothers and the bubble, concluded that Europe is being suffocated by the United States and China, which are vying to impose a new world order. The remark, broadcast on public television, left those commenting on it stunned: the diagnosis attributed to the channel points outward when, according to that reading, much of Europe's decline was brewed at home. It is the kind of twist that turns a historical retrospective into a blame-shifting exercise.

The exact point where the analysis gets stuck

The discussion never reaches agreement because it mixes two different things: the documentary value of a six-decade archive and the editorial role of the channel that produced it. You can defend the first and distrust the second, or the other way around. What nobody manages to clarify is how much of what was broadcast was self-serving narrative and how much a simple reflection of its time. And there it stays, with the archive open and the wound still raw.