2024 is proving to be a year of revelations. As it draws to a close, there is still time for significant challenges, especially in domestic and foreign policy, which threatens to burst the point and the line where it is tenuously held. To this end, one of the main weapons used is to weaken the Fourth Estate. Journalism is one of the oldest pillars of democracy as we know it.
Its role is to ensure that nothing can go unpunished, whether it’s politicians, judges, or all the considerable economic groups that want to control society with their unregulated liberal market. 
A journalist cannot lower her head and ignore scandals, incompetence, and backroom deals. A journalist must not submit to the tyranny of employers, who often fund political parties and ideologies. Journalists cannot be asked to blindly follow orders. Those who choose journalism tend to follow a vocation for curiosity and discovery. They want to do good, inform, and make the world known but also work to improve these realities and hold up mirrors to all the forces that try to control thought and critical mass. Journalism is a profession of excellence, and we want to be free and dedicated to society.

On October 8, Luís Montenegro announced a strategy to destroy journalism as it should be. The process had been underway for a long time due to the big tycoons acquiring groups such as Global Media. It’s worth remembering the tsunami of collective redundancies resulting from this unregulated sale. But it’s also important to remember other people, opinion commentators, investigative journalists, and even editors-in-chief who have been systematically sanitized in recent years for the powers that be.
The PSD has now announced just the culmination of what was already expected. A prime minister, in full exercise of his duties, even if he is part of a minority government, spoke to journalists to ask them to be gentle, not to do research, to refrain from denying, and to bow to the law of silence and the law of the weakest. All this while announcing public investment in the private media sector and threatening social media with phrases that could have been written by Trump’s speechwriters. In an act of inconsequence, he even criticized the earpieces used by professionals as if they were the source of inappropriate questions. It is as if journalism shouldn’t exist precisely to ask unexpected questions, raise hackles, and threaten those who wish to conceal fraud!
All this, told ten years ago, no one would believe it.
Perhaps it’s not entirely true. Just over ten years ago, the government of Pedro Passos Coelho, one of Montenegro’s mentors, was moving towards privatizing RTP. On the same day that the current Prime Minister asked journalists to keep their voices down and only speak when praising the work of those in office, a blow was also announced, which may well be the last blow to public service television in Portugal. Advertising on those channels will be phased out, leaving a gap of millions, resulting in collective redundancies, hunger, and injustice. Once RTP is weakened, it will be easier to badmouth it and demand its privatization. This strategy has proven itself in EDP, CTT, TAP, and, around here in the Azores, SATA itself. It’s yet another effort to destroy the real civil service, which reflects the strategy of a PSD that is only a social democrat in name and is clinging to and raising the banners of the parties of the extreme economic and anti-social right-wing parties.
RTP is one of the primary institutions of our democracy. It is the home of journalism that has always been desired to be impartial and well done, running against private profit and against attempts by public authorities to control it. A country without RTP is made up of businessmen in suits who carry out the threat that either we accept being a punching bag or go down with it. No matter how badly Portugal has been sailing, RTP and its branches have always been a beacon in the middle of the storm. 
According to Montenegro, what people need is to be shipwrecked. Whoever has the money should sail around on a yacht, following the news commissioned from privatized, tailor-made channels.
The government’s Action Plan for Lusa is not very different from what is proposed for RTP in that it envisages a significant reduction in revenue for Lusa through newspaper discounts. According to the plan, the discounts for services of public interest are between 50% and 75% for regional and local media and between 30% and 50% for national media. However, this news agency offers three free services on the topics of gender identity, disinformation, and culture. A blind cut without compensation can only lead to an end…
Here ion the Azores, Boleiro announced that the extraordinary subsidy for the media, which had been discussed and reflected on since his previous administration, would go ahead, using the argument
public duty to help those who need it most, but apparently keeping the Collective Bargaining Agreement out of the equation.
Perhaps it would be essential to remind the president of the regional government that this same subsidy should be extended to social and cultural areas that have recently suffered cuts and persecution from the coalition and its extremist partners.
Exempt journalism is on the verge of extinction. Without it, more and more backroom deals will be played to the wind, and the ignorance of civil society will be while we take giant steps toward a government of total impunity. It’s a severe case that can only lead us to ask: until when?


Alexandra Manes publishes regularly in Azorean newspapers. She is originally from the island of Flores and currently makes her home in Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira, Azores.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL)