Portugal: Many structures, little accountability

The Portuguese media system is shaped by its historical background of nearly 50 years of dictatorship and a dramatic transition period to democracy. Being a small market, there is a tendency to instrumentalization by the elite and a low consumption of news, fitting Hallin and Mancini’s Polarized Pluralist Model. A partisan journalism was put in place during the Revolution of 1974, but by then journalists had also experienced a free press and established an ethical code. The revolutionary period brought considerable instability to newsrooms, media property and news content, but it also brought a press law that granted great powers to journalists. Since then, several accountability instruments have emerged, namely a press council that has evolved to the present regulatory entity of communication. Journalists have witnessed a growing deontological ‘legal regulation’, which is framed by several MAIs. However, the increase in these institutions and codes does not seem to attract great participation from citizens, and journalists’ professional attitudes towards external entities prevail as mistrustful, tending to disregard the opinion of people outside their professional field. The Portuguese media system generally fits the Polarized Pluralist Model, defined as a "strong prevalence of partisan media, a tendency to instrumentalization of media by politic and economic elites and their use as tools of bargaining and maneuvering among those elites, frequent state intervention and involvement in the media system, lesser development of journalistic professionalism, lower newspaper circulation and so on". In Portugal, the censorship imposed by the authoritarian regime was the biggest constraint on journalism and media organizations during the 20th century. The number of media accountability instruments increased with democracy. Media models are usually determined by how the political regime interacts with the media system, which depends on whether the regime is democratic or non-democratic. In the Portuguese case, the Revolution of 1974 ended a period of almost 50 years of dictatorship. Portuguese journalists only established their professional ethics in the last quarter of the 20th century, after the 1974 Revolution, which restored the freedom of the press.