It's easy to say, but it's no small feat: this year marks forty years that TV3 has been available to view from Mallorca. It all began in 1985, thanks to the Voltor Association, promoted by the Balearic Cultural Work (OBA), and the "We want TV in our language: TV3 now!" campaign, which received contributions from more than 1,000 citizens to purchase land in Alfàbia and install a repeater. Later, other networks arrived, such as Canal 33, the now-defunct Valencian Canal 9 and Punt 2, and the stations Catalunya Ràdio, Catalunya Informació, and Catalunya Música. And in 2005, naturally, IB3 was born, which has seen better and worse times in terms of language normalization and the representation of our society. But what remains of all this today? With all the apparent progress, do we have the audiovisual ecosystem we deserve?
While it's undeniable that the citizens of the Balearic Islands suffer the grievance of insularity in areas such as human movement and freight transport, it seems that today we are still too limited to apply this idea to other areas that are, in fact, closely related. Culture, the media, and audiovisual are some examples. Although the quantitative availability of Catalan-language media has never been so extensive, and even more so with the possibilities offered by the internet, it remains to be seen whether the objective of many of these radio and television networks fulfills two of their founding goals: linguistic normalization, on the one hand, and the revitalization of the autonomous audiovisual sector.
A first source of concern is the increasingly bilingual nature of TV3, or what they now want to call 3Cat. The (well-deserved) retirement of the admired Margalida Solivellas as correspondent has exposed what appears to be a certain neglect on the part of the CCMA toward the Islands, and the intermittent nature of the voice representing us on the news, to cite a seemingly anecdotal but highly symbolic indicator, makes our voices more audible.
And the same thing happens in IB3, where programs with a marked diglossic component, such as the musical contest LaLaLa, as well as some radio debates conducted almost entirely in Spanish, only reveal the lack of complexes of the new management of the house, Josep Codony, when it comes to gradually reducing the space for the language of the Balearic Islands.
Meanwhile, while we wait for À Punt to be broadcast one day from our homes, it remains to be seen whether 2Cat, the new Catalan-language channel from Spanish National Television and Television (Radiotelevisión Española), will also broadcast in the islands. And even more so: will it, as it should, include professionals from the Balearic Islands and Valencia in its teams?
Insularity has material effects, but also a profound symbolic impact. How long will we, the Catalan-speaking citizens of the Balearic Islands, remain second-class citizens?
