La transparencia en la nueva ordenación del sector audiovisual español. Comentarios a la Ley General de Comunicación Audiovisual y otras normas administrativas recientes

Abstract

The General Act 7/2010, on Audiovisual Communication, constitutes the backbone of a set of legal reforms recently carried out in the Spanish Audiovisual sector. All those
reforms have entailed transcendental changes in the traditional regulation of the sector, namely, the liberalization of private terrestrial broadcasting and the partial deregulation of the public service of broadcasting; the elimination of the administrative concession technique and its replacement by a system of licences and previous notifications for private operators; the new financing of the Spanish State broadcaster, RTVE; the allocation of frequencies for the ‘digital dividend’ after the analogue switch-off; the progressive relaxation of antitrust measures facilitating mergers in the television sector; the regulation
of pay-DTT or the creation of State Council for Audiovisual Media (CEMA), the State independent and monitoring authority for the Spanish audiovisual sector. This paper will
be focused on those relevant changes in the light of the principle of transparency and others closely related, such as the ones of pluralism, competition, publicity or citizen’s
participation in public issues. Furthermore, it will be also analyzed whether this new regulation is consistent or not with the aforesaid principles.