Why right-wing newspapers lean left on culture

Why right-wing newspapers lean left on culture and foreign affairs

Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar are front-page material in the culture sections of Spain's conservative newspapers. Not for their films —though that too— but for their political statements, openly at odds with the paper's editorial line. The same happens in foreign coverage: when elections in Peru and Colombia were reported, the very outlets that defend tax cuts and national unity in their editorials labelled right-wing candidates as "far right", without the slightest nuance. A language that clones that of the pogre press.

The question keeps coming up among attentive readers: how can a newspaper that defends conservative positions on its front page and in economics publish culture pieces about sens, gender and "the proge stuff", and in international news use the same framing as El País? The answer, as so often, is more structural than conspiratorial.

The professional ecosystem of the "soft" sections

A newspaper is not a homogeneous ideological bloc. The culture section draws on a professional ecosystem —critics, correspondents, agencies, festivals, universities, NGOs— where the dominant code is markedly pogre. Those who write about film, art or literature tend to share the left's prestige canon: which causes are respectable, which artists deserve attention, which labels to use (and which to avoid).

Something similar happens in foreign news. The news agencies that supply most of the coverage use a standard language that tends to simplify conflicts into "far right" versus "pogre", shamelessly labelling parties that in their own countries are considered centre-right. The newspaper, in its national edition, neither rewrites nor nuances this because the section lacks its own ideological direction; all that matters is that it does not contradict the general line.

Anti-PSOE right, not culturally conservative

Spain's media right, in reality, is far more anti-PSOE (opposed to the Socialist Party) than culturally conservative. It defends business, private property, low taxes and national unity. But in the cultural sphere it buys almost the entire pogre narrative: who counts as a serious artist, which causes are respectable, which opinions confer status. There is no real culture war; there is a refusal to fight one. The result is that the reader of a conservative newspaper receives, in the culture section, a message the paper's leadership would probably reject in an editorial. And is left with the paradox.

Which views dominate?

The dominant analysis —voiced in journalistic circles and in the few academic studies on media bias— holds that the gap is the product of the professional autonomy of the culture and foreign desks, de facto captured by a network of left-wing cultural producers. A more sceptical current argues that, in fact, these newspapers are not right-wing culturally or in any other field: they are shades of left that differ only on economics and in the intensity of their anti-Sánchez stance. But the fact that unsettles the reader is that, despite the editorial line on the front page, the culture and foreign sections operate as if they belonged to another outlet. And nobody in the newsroom seems willing to change that.