There was a time when the name of Belen Esteban It stood as a synecdoche for what some called “trash TV.” At that time, the most modest were scandalized by the media exposure of a woman who, with no other merit than having been the girlfriend of a bullfighter, had managed to become the muse of gossip. Her screams, her fights, her televised tears and her peculiar oratory were the perfect seasoning to turn her into the banner of a television that stripped itself of any cultural or ethical fickleness. Belén Esteban was not a singer, nor an athlete, nor a scientist, nor a writer; It was simply the broken mirror of a society eager for banality. She became a social phenomenon and a provider of such popular expressions as “I wouldn’t even have been Bin Laden” or “Andrea, eat the chicken.”
But let’s not fool ourselves: the figure of Belén Esteban, whom we admire in many aspects, is not the real problem for those of us who defended her merits or her profitability when the most bitter intellectuals swore to watch documentaries on La 2 after eating and denied bread and the salt to the poor puppets who gouged out their eyes for money with such intensity as if the world were ending every afternoon. Having Belén Esteban on public television is not important, it is not a problem but it is the symptom. His rise to stardom at the time of the ‘belenazos’ was the reflection of a media network that, led by Telecinco and its intrepid audience alchemists, knew how to turn frivolity into gold, the ephemeral into permanent. The ‘belenazos’, as their star appearances were called, not only guaranteed stratospheric ratings but also managed to establish in the collective imagination the idea that scandal, confrontation and emotional misery were acceptable currency in the big bazaar. television. The entertainment industry, converted into a Coliseum where gladiators did not brandish swords but stark biographies, eschatologies, attacks on people who passed by, made Belén Esteban its greatest exponent along with Jorge Javier Vázquez. The producers of everything said that Belén was the “co-presenter.”
The case of Belén Esteban as Broncano’s weapon in the public could have been relegated to the sphere of the anecdotal, one more chapter in the saga of cultural degradations that public television offers us. The emergence of this iconography on Spanish Radio Television, financed with the money of all Spaniards, transcends the anecdotal to become a political and cultural issue of the first order. It’s not just that RTVE has opened its doors to figures like Esteban or to dynamics typical of formats like save mebut has done so under the banner of a supposed “public service.” What public service does a television that reproduces the same formulas as its private competitors provide? What sense does it make to spend 1.3 billion euros a year on a programming model indistinguishable from that offered, for free, by commercial channels?
The answer is not simple, but it points to a broader phenomenon: the progressive ‘salvamization’ of public space. This is not limited to television; It reaches all areas of our collective life. We live in a time in which entertainment has invaded politics, culture and even citizen debate. The figure of Belén Esteban, once relegated to the private media circus, first Antena 3 and then Telecinco, now finds a home on public television as an emblem of this new normality: the trivialization of the important and the exaltation of the trivial. Valencian public television and many others that broadcast Tombola They had to get off that car that the great public TV of Spain will get on in 2025.
From culture to noise
In another time, RTVE boasted of being a tool to raise the cultural level of citizens. The news programs sought to be impartial, programs like The Key They fueled critical debate and spaces dedicated to music, theater or literature offered a refuge from the tsunami of banality that flooded other frequencies. Today, however, RTVE seems to have abdicated that responsibility. With signings and content inappropriate for a public channel, TVE surrenders to the dictatorship of the audiences and submits to the same dynamics of confrontation and spectacle that once at least did not cost public money.
It is no coincidence that this shift occurs in a political context marked by polarization and tension. RTVE managers, aware that noise sells, have chosen to compete on the same terrain as their private rivals. But what could be justified in the scope of a private company like Mediaset, whose sole objective is to maximize profits, is unacceptable in an institution financed with public funds. When RTVE copies the worst vices of Telecinco, it not only betrays its mission, but also deprives citizens of a space where they can find alternatives to the dictatorship of empty entertainment.
The trivialization of the public
What RTVE does should not be analyzed in isolation, but as part of a broader process of decomposition of the values that, in theory, should sustain the public sphere. What is at stake in this battle is not only the quality of television programming, but the model of society that we want to build. When public television renounces being a cultural beacon to become an echo of commercial dynamics, what is at stake is not only the prestige of a network, but the ability of a nation to preserve a common space where the general interest prevails. on particular interest.
We are facing a deeper crisis: the inability of our institutions to resist the challenge of a culture of spectacle that has turned politics, culture and television into a great save me. And, as spectators of this decline, we must ask ourselves: will we continue to be passive accomplices of this drift or will we find the courage to demand that the spectator not be told to “eat the chicken!”?
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