Thursday, March 28

The journalist who beat the CRTVG in court: “It is a triumph against manipulation in the public media”


After hearing the sentence that agrees with him in front of the Galicia Radio and Television Corporation (CRTVG), Carlos Jiménez published a thread on Twitter That starts with the memory of how bad it happened the day he learned that the public company was opening a disciplinary file for him. The process ended with a suspension of employment and salary for nine days for him. The worker, linked to the Galician public radio, brought the sanction to justice, which now condemns the CRTVG and considers that it has not managed to dismantle that the punishment was due to Jiménez’s involvement in the Black Venres, days of protest against information “manipulation”. “It is a great triumph for Defende a Galega -the platform that drives the mobilizations- as a champion of the defense of freedom in the public media and the fight against manipulation,” says the journalist in conversation with elDiario.es.

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“I do not say it, the judge says it in the sentence repeatedly,” he emphasizes. The text of the Social Court number 1 of Santiago de Compostela outlines the entire process and declares the sanction null. In addition, it obliges the public company to pay Carlos Jiménez the wages he has stopped receiving and to pay him compensation for damages for having violated his fundamental rights. He considers that there are “evidence accredited in an objective manner” that allows “to infer that the sanction is in direct causal and also temporal relationship with his judicial activity and with the manifestation of his journalistic discrepancy with respect to the information policy of the corporation.” With the arguments of the CRTVG, he adds, “the intention of retaliation in its sanctioning action against the worker cannot be undoubtedly excluded.”

The events begin in 2018. On May 25 of that year the Black Venres, in which the sentence considers it to be proven that Carlos Jiménez had an “active and intense participation.” A few months later, in October of that year, the CRTVG opened the disciplinary proceedings against him for his participation as an announcer in a program that the public company had acquired from an external production company. The worker had recognized for years the compatibility to carry out his tasks in the public media and carry out other assignments for private companies.

The judge considers that “the weakness of the evidence in relation to the lack of knowledge of the actor’s private activity”, together with the “temporary immediacy” that exists between the beginning of the Black Venres and the record, “allows to conclude that the sanction is a response of the defendant entity to the legal action -the worker had several litigations in defense of his labor rights- and journalism of the plaintiff in a cause-effect relationship.”

Jiménez considers this sentence to be “very important” because he recognizes that his fundamental rights were violated and he understands that this repairs his “honor” and gives meaning to having defended his values ​​”to the end.” However, he believes that it is “difficult” to give back everything “suffered”. The worker says that he hopes that those responsible for the company will apologize to him, but “it seems that they are not for the work.” He is grateful for the support of the “many” colleagues who were involved in the process, of some media that have echoed the sentence and of the Colexio de Xornalistas, but he criticizes that other public media workers who are “on his couch instead. to be at the side of the comrades in this fight “.

He also reflects on the situation in the private press: “Some media that are a bit silenced published the information and then withdrew it from the web. That is why I say that there is much to be done.” “And here they will find us, as we have been doing these 184 weeks,” he says. That is the time that CRTVG workers have been with their protests of the Black Venres. It has been more than three years of denunciation of what I consider a “manipulation” of the information offered on Galician public television and radio.

After hearing the sentence, the spokesperson for the CUT union -which has supported Jiménez in the process- in the CRTVG, Raquel Lema, highlighted in a statement that the ruling is “absolutely repairing”: “A power such as the judiciary declares, for the first time Once, something that the media workers have been understanding, suffering and denouncing for years and that is especially serious within a public communication medium: that there is no freedom of expression and that there are reprisals for demanding informational impartiality and plurality “. It considers that “the natural thing” would be that in the next days a purification of responsibilities takes place.

The protests of the workers continue despite the scant receptivity of those responsible for the Xunta. The Galician president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, showed in an interview with elDiario.es, in March 2020, his surprise when he learned that the Black Venres they continued. Complaints about the treatment of news content are not the only ones that have spilled over into the Galician public media, which in recent months have increased the list of controversies over sexist content, as in the case of one of the star programs, which cornered a young woman to try to reconnect with her ex-partner, from whom she had separated due to her controlling attitudes. The general director of the CRTVG, Alfonso Sánchez Izquierdo, in office since 2009, downgraded the episode to “an error.”





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