Spain — news channels live

To understand Spanish broadcasting you need the country's administrative structure. Spain is composed of autonomous communities, most of which have their own public broadcaster: TV3 in Catalonia, EiTB in the Basque Country and TVG in Galicia publish in their own languages. News in Spain is therefore watched not on a single national screen but through overlapping layers — national channels in Castilian Spanish, regional channels in Catalan, Basque and Galician. Seeing how an event is framed differently in Madrid and in Barcelona is one of the most direct routes into Spanish politics.

The national public broadcaster is RTVE. The corporation lived through the transition from the state television of the Franco period to the public broadcaster of the democratic era, and the political independence of its governance has been a recurring argument ever since.

Two large groups dominate the private sector: Atresmedia and Mediaset España. Atresmedia owns both channels listed below — Antena 3 and laSexta — which are positioned for different audiences with different editorial tones, an interesting instance of a single group broadcasting in two distinct voices.