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INPRIMATU
The City of Pamplona excludes for the second consecutive year the media in Basque from the institutional advertising
  • Media outlets that, like last year, have a 10% total audience will be able to participate in the tender, with Euskaldun being 10.5% of the population of Pamplona. EH Bildu has denounced that the City Hall does not respect the right to receive information from the media in Basque and has warned that there is no objective justification for extending the item for "online press".
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The municipal group EH Bildu of the City of Pamplona has denounced the modification of the distribution criteria for the purchase of advertising spaces in the media announced by the trio of the right. Three of the main arguments in the complaint are: The exclusion of all media in Basque from the advertising distribution, the violation of the rights of people who choose the media in Basque to access public information, and the "unjustified" increase of the line for digital media. The sovereign coalition believes that the latest change aims to curb the attempt to finance the media that are members of the municipal government. "The new specifications for the award of these advertising spaces represent a strong discrimination against the media that they report in one of the two official languages of this city, since no specific items are kept for the media in Basque and the total distribution is calculated according to the global audiences of the media," explained EH Bildu.

From this formula it is concluded that the media in Basque, with a lower ratio of potential audience, "in the four planned lots (press, radio, television and online) will be excluded from the advertising distribution, demanding a minimum of 10% of the total audience". "Given that today it is estimated that 15% of the population of Pamplona that uses the Basque language well, these minimum audience limits set by the tripartite on the right are as if a Spanish-language media gathering 90% of the potential audience were required to hire advertising spaces with the City Hall," the coalition explained. "Evidently, public means have been used to discriminate against the Basque and the Basque speakers," added Lehendakari.

On the other hand, EH Bildu considers that the increase in the item for the "online media" lot, almost equalling with 200,000 euros that of the written press (220,000 euros), "hides a strategy to finance a concrete media to which Navarra belongs Suma". There is no objective justification for the increase in this item (the digital press) and the communication department itself acknowledges the difficulty of having reliable audience data in this sector. For this reason, "it is suspicious that the government team of Enrique Maya intends to increase the funds allocated to this lot, even more so when the decision benefits a specific medium linked to the extreme right". "From the management of this dossier it follows that the objective of Navarre Suma is to veto the communication in Basque, forcing the Basques to receive information from the Spanish-language media council and to finance the media that have as their objective to sustain the right in power", he summarized.