From dictatorship to the market: the transition of the mass media in Spain or where was the social responsibility of the media

In the Spanish transition period from Franco's dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, the totalitarian control of the media turned into a liberalization of the media quite quickly, and this fact was interpreted as a success of liberty, obviating debate on the role of the state intervention and arbitration that had been taking place in European and American countries since the mid-twentieth century. If elsewhere the privatization of the media was understood as a deterioration of its social function, in Spain it was expressed as a part of freedom of speech that must necessarily accompany the new political freedom.