Portuguese Establishment Media Are Collapsing Like Dominoes

It is an odd turn of events for all those who remember the TEDTalks of the 2000s on the future of media to observe the topic disappear from public light just as the issue of ‘fake news’ reaches stratospheric levels of polemics.

The revelation of the Lewinsky Scandal by the news blog Drudge Report would forever change the essence of journalism, and, once upon a time, journalists themselves were apprehensive about the future of their profession and interested in discussing it. Fast-forward twenty years and, far from willing to discuss anything at all, mainstream media are now more focused on suppressing their online rivals.

YouTube now artificially forces legacy sources on their viewers—who normally opt for the former so as to avoid the latter—as do Google and other search engines. As for TV and press, they spend their time policing ‘the truth’ in a pathetic, disgraceful display of what can only be described as an Orwellian boomer avatar of Dolores Umbridge.

Those guilty of opposing the ‘current thing’ are regularly smeared by the mainstream media’s companion armies of pundits and commentators as ‘populists,’ ‘extremists,’ or ‘deniers.’ The penalty is the censuring and even banning of personal private accounts and profiles. In extremis, an entire news story is suppressed across the board—as was the case for the Hunter Biden laptop story—and in totalitarian regimes such as those of Germany or the UK, citizens will actually be investigated, fined and even arrested for posting wrongthink tweets.

In all this, Portugal is very much the norm. As with most southern countries, Portugal is always slightly behind the times so the Portuguese are not yet visited by police for their online posts, but … give it time.

Already, pseudo ‘fact checking operations’ have emerged throughout mainstream media in the past decade.

State-owned RTP put out a weekly show entitled Prova dos Factos (The Proof of Facts), run by journalists notorious for social media tirades against the Right.

The private TV channel TVI/CNN Portugal, owned by the holding company Media Capital, partnered with the online news site Observador in a fact checking operation they named Hora da Verdade (Truth Hour).

The private but historical Impresa group is responsible for the most infamous of them: Polígrafo. This is an operation which has been previously revealed to be heavily biased and even compromised by extremist connections.

All without exception shy away from fact-checking those who claim to issue the most news and facts—journalists—and instead spend their time scrutinizing politicians for the most petty of technicalities, aka those known to use hyperbole and rhetoric in speeches.

Every reader can judge the merits of these supposed journalistic efforts. For now, it’s enough to note the reckoning facing the country’s legacy media.

For decades, the TV landscape was dominated by the state-owned RTP group and the private SIC and TVI outlets.

RTP is a typical failing-upwards operation since it is publicly funded—even during the tenure of ‘centre-right’ governments—with half the budget of the culture ministry being earmarked for its survival. RTP is forever plagued by a permanent sclerosis, gradually losing market share and having been forced to fire hundreds of personnel in 2025 alone.

While Media Capital is financially stable, its main asset, TVI/CNN Portugal, has not turned a profit since before the pandemic and is in virtual bankruptcy. Independently, TVI’s main talk show host Cristina Ferreira promoted an entire line of merchandise of which the magazine Cristina was the main investment. The magazine went bankrupt earlier this year with a million euros in debt, after a decade of operations.

SIC is controlled by the Impresa Group, which also publishes the Expresso newspaper and the Visão magazine. SIC was seen as close to the centre-right PSD (EPP) party and pioneered private media in the Iberian state. The Impresa empire’s first fatality was Visão, which was initially spun into a separate ad hoc company—shamelessly named Trust in News—along with a significant debt. Choosing a fanatically leftist journalist to lead it through hard times was probably the poisoned chalice of the entire enterprise, with the publication recently finally being declared bankrupt after racking up €15 million in debts—much of that owed to public banks. The intrepidm brave journalists even organised a public campaign to save the magazine, which was utterly ignored by the public.

Yet, Visão is but the tip of the iceberg, for the entire Impresa group is severely underwater: Impresa carries a 1/4 billion euro debt and recently tried, unsuccessfully, to sell its HQ building for €37 million. The owners of SIC and Expresso now pin their hopes on the fresh investment being made by the Italian group Media For Europe (MFE), owned by the Berlusconi family, which has acquired a third of Impresa and staved off bankruptcy for the time being.

Elsewhere, historical Portuguese outlets such as the newspapers Diário de Notícias and Jornal de Notícias and the newsradio channel TSF are all equally underwater.

The only ray of sunshine seems to come from footballer Cristiano Ronaldo’s investments. His holding company CR7 owns the sensationalist newspaper Correio da Manhã and its television spinoff, CMTV, both of which regularly present modest profits.

Undoubtedly, the overall legacy media crisis is not entirely the fault of the loss of credibility of the journalistic class, but it certainly helped. The growing sophistication of the internet and smartphones represents a widening of the competition for market share that expensive production operations such as TV channels could never hope to rival. That being said, collapsing standards and shameless elitist bias only accelerated the collapse. Not only did journalists become more professionally dependent on corrupt corporate narratives, but the internet also made their mistakes perpetually available and subject to individual scrutiny, more than ever before. It didn’t help that journalism schools churned out communication degrees in excess across the West, weakening journalists’ bargaining power before their editors and employers.

Finally, a business model based on actual fairness or, alternatively, on actual right-wing bias, might have allowed media and news operations to have survived longer. Instead, they bet it all on Trump, Musk, and Putin hatemongering, competing exclusively for the attention of elderly leftist spectators. No surprise then that it is FOX News in the U.S. or CMTV in Portugal that still manage to maintain loyal audiences: they inherited a monopoly on elderly right-of-centre viewers.

Portugal’s media panorama has come to an ignominious end. They failed the Portuguese people and tarnished the reputation of those that built the news outlets from scratch.