The regional parliament’s commission of enquiry on the press, instituted by the local PSD and comprised of PSD MPs came to the conclusion that the Diário wants to close the Jornal da Madeira. What a joke!
For many years President Jardim has ranted and raged against the Diário saying it is the main opposition on the island and that without the Diário no opposition would exist.
For over a decade, he has been promising and threatening to expropriate the Diário and to do so in such a way as to cause the greatest financial damage to its owners. He also threatened that the scope of Government measures taken to harm the interests of the DN owners would reach beyond the Diário newspaper itself and affect other areas.
In his official speeches, in the fashion of a true dictator, President Jardim has repeatedly urged businessmen to boycott advertising in the Diário. He once even burned a copy of the Diário in public.
Eventually, seeing that expropriating the Diário newspaper, the only real rival of the Jornal, would cause too great a scandal, Jardim announced that he would adopt more refined methods and that there was going to be a ‘cleansing’ among the ranks of the Diário newspapers.
His solution was to pump enormous sums into the Jornal, turn it into a freebie newspaper and undercut the advertising market by price dumping, all in order to cut the Diário’s source of revenue, force job cuts among the journalists and eventually bankrupt the newspaper.
Not unexpectedly, the national parliament’s commission of enquiry, whose report records all these facts, concluded the opposite to the regional parliamentary commission. i.e. The Regional Government is trying and succeeding to scupper the independent press in Madeira.
Jardim and the PSD labeled the conclusion a 'colonial' interference in Madeira’s internal affairs.
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