IB3: A new black four-year period is on the horizon for Catalan.

In the Balearic Islands, there are around twenty DTT channels that broadcast films in Spanish, but the PP and Vox have decided that the only channel that breaks the rule, the regional channel IB3, will now offer new releases only in Spanish or the original version. It was seen this weekend: the film The Master Gardener It has a version in Catalan, but the chain did not offer it, violating everything from the Statute to the law on public broadcasting bodies, or even the minimum sense of decency. Catalan struggles for oxygen in a media landscape where English and Spanish suffocate it, and you close one of the few windows through which it can breathe. The measure comes after various linguistic controversies, such as when presenter Àngela Alfaro interrupted a guest speaking in Catalan to urge him to switch to Spanish "to make more sense." (More sense of linguistic extinction, one must assume.) The Castilianization of IB3 is complicated because the legal framework is very explicit about the need to protect Catalan and make it the vehicular language, but the current government is taking advantage of every opportunity to pass the ribot and slim down Catalan wherever it can.

The situation is all too reminiscent of the lamentable period of José Ramón Bauzá, who between 2011 and 2015 undertook a four-year black market for the Castilianization of IB3. The pretext at the time was that the rights to the Catalan-dubbed versions were expiring: a cheapskate's excuse like any other. After Andreu Manresa's hiatus, the arrival of Josep Codony as the television director raises fears of the start of a new regressive mandate, one in which even the heroic but minimal linguistic resistance of a Catalan-language channel is bothersome: let's remember that IB3 achieved a mere 5.2% audience share last year. Perhaps the remaining 94.8% for Castilian is too little.