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Portugal THE MEDIA
During the long Salazar regime, the media operated
under
strict authoritarian control. The press was heavily
censored,
radio and television were government-controlled, and
writers who
violated the regime's guidelines were subject to severe
sanctions. Even the lists of books that were requested by
readers
from the National Library in Lisbon were reviewed by
secret
police officials. Foreign magazines were similarly
inspected
before being put on the newsstands, sometimes with whole
stories
blotted out. The controls and censorship were stifling,
leading
to a pervasive and boring conformity in the media.
Under Caetano the rules were relaxed somewhat. Some
novelists
and essayists were able to publish critical and
controversial
works and get away with it. The press might speak out
indirectly,
with long analyses of elections in Chile or West Germany,
for
example, when everyone understood the real topic was the
absence
of free elections in Portugal. Only the weekly newspaper
Expresso was strong enough to test the regime's
tolerance
with virtually every issue.
After the coup of April 25, 1974, the mass
communications
media underwent a radical transformation. One of the first
acts
of the revolutionary government was to abolish censorship.
But as
the revolution veered to the left, some portions of the
media
were seized by opponents of the views they expressed. Two
of the
most celebrated cases involved the closing of the
Socialist Party
newspaper República and the Roman Catholic Church's
Rádio
Renascença.
Government involvement in the media greatly increased
when
the banks were nationalized. Because most banks owned at
least
one newspaper, the state found itself the owner of many
newspapers. With time, however, the government divested
itself of
these properties. By the beginning of the 1990s, no
newspapers in
Portugal were government owned, and the country had a
completely
free press. Although the state still operated radio and
television broadcasting systems, the constitution states
that
they are to provide equal access to political parties, in
or out
of power. Large interest groups are also to have access to
the
state-owned electronic media.
At the beginning of the 1990s, about thirty newspapers
were
published daily in Portugal. They ranged from excellent
newspapers like Público, an independent; and the
historic
Diário de Notícias, a newspaper of record; to
sensationalistic crowd-pleasers such as Correio da
Manhã.
Público, founded in 1990, had sections dealing with
both
Lisbon and Porto and provided perhaps the most national
news. Two
excellent weekly newspapers filled the place taken in the
United
States by Time and Newsweek:
Expresso, which
had fought bravely for press freedom before the
revolution; and
O Independente, founded in 1988, which included
pages
enlivened by wicked satires of public figures. In addition
to
these publications, Portugal had a variety of specialized
magazines.
In 1975 all commercial broadcasting facilities except
those
belonging to the Roman Catholic Church were nationalized.
As of
the beginning of the 1990s, however, hundreds of private
radio
stations were in operation, in addition to the large Roman
Catholic radio system Rádio Renascença. The state
broadcasting
system was named Radiodifusão Portuguesa (RDP). Television
service was furnished by the state system, Radiotelevisão
Portuguesa (RTP), which broadcast on two channels. At the
beginning of the 1990s, however, plans were being made to
establish privately owned television in Portugal.
Portugal's film industry was very small. It produced
mainly
short films and documentaries for local television. Few
fulllength films were made in Portugal, and those that were
had not
found a market abroad. However, a few Portuguese
directors, the
veteran Manoel de Oliveira and Paolo Rocha, for example,
were
highly esteemed by film cognoscenti the world over.
Book publishing was more prosperous, within the limits
of the
local market. Portugal had more than fifty publishing
houses.
They published books by Portuguese authors but also did a
major
business in translations of foreign authors. During the
mid1970s , works by Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other
writers on
the left dominated the bestseller lists. In the period
since,
Portuguese readers turned to a greater diversity of
authors. The
country's relatively high illiteracy rate of about 15
percent and
the fact that most Portuguese read little made for a small
market. As a result, books were expensive, and printings
of even
bestselling books were usually limited to 2,000 to 3,000
copies.
Data as of January 1993
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