The Media Regulator Finds Lusa's New Statutes Outside the Law, With the One Safeguard Against Government Control Postponed to 2030
The ERC ruled on Wednesday that the restructuring of Portugal's state-owned news agency does not comply with the applicable framework, and that rules of this kind belong in a law of parliament rather than a shareholder resolution.
Almost every Portuguese newsroom, including the English-language ones, runs on copy from a single wire service. That service is Lusa, the state owns all of it, and Portugal's media regulator has now found that the way the government rewrote its governing statutes this year does not comply with the law.
The finding came in a deliberation from the Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (Media Regulatory Authority, ERC) released on Wednesday. It concludes that the restructuring of the agency "is not in conformity with the applicable normative framework", nor with the recommendations and "good practices of the independent functioning of a public media outlet". On Friday the Sindicato dos Jornalistas (Journalists' Union, SJ), which brought the complaint, asked the government to act on it.
What the regulator objected to
The core objection is about the instrument, not just the content. Guarantees of a public outlet's independence from the government and other public powers are, the ERC says, a matter reserved to statute under the Constitution. A deliberation by the State acting as shareholder does not appear to be "a sufficient and adequate instrument" for setting those rules. In plain terms: the rules of the agency should have been written by parliament in a law, and instead they were written by the executive in a shareholder resolution.
That distinction has a practical consequence the ERC spells out. Parliamentary scrutiny of Lusa, which as with RTP includes hearing the head of news before the competent committee, becomes "of contingent application" precisely because the deliberation approving the statutes has no normative force. A scrutiny mechanism that rests on a document parliament did not pass is a scrutiny mechanism that can be set aside.
The safeguard that starts in 2030
The new statutes widen Lusa's board to three members, all designated by the government on behalf of the State as sole shareholder. The government presented a Conselho Consultivo (Advisory Council) as the mechanism that would mitigate the risk of the agency being governmentalised, by requiring a prior opinion on board appointments.
The ERC found that the approval of the statutes postponed that mechanism to the election of the next board, for the 2030 to 2033 term. The result, in the regulator's words, is immediate institutional exposure running through the whole of the current four-year term, 2026 to 2029. It also noted that Lusa's three executive directors, appointed for four years, were elected the day before the requirement for a prior Advisory Council opinion came into force.
The regulator was more measured on journalists' participation, finding it safeguarded by the involvement of the news director. Separately, it has opened its own procedure into the competition questions raised by the "synergies" between Lusa and RTP.
What happens now
The ERC's view is that the non-conformity has effects "as of today and throughout the four-year mandate of the current board", effects it expects to be significant "in terms of national, European and international public perception" of how independent Lusa is from political power. That is a reputational judgment as much as a legal one, and it arrives while the statutes are under discussion in parliamentary committee.
The union filed its complaint on 13 April, arguing that the statutes worsened the risks of external interference, particularly political influence over the editorial line. It has also complained to the Provedor de Justiça (Ombudsman) against the government, and frames the case in terms of the European Media Freedom Act. Its message on Friday was that the committee stage should not ignore the regulator: the independence of Lusa, it said, requires defences "removed from the discretion of party interests".
Readers here have a direct stake in this that is easy to miss. Lusa is a Tier 1 source for this publication and for most others covering Portugal, which means the wire's independence is upstream of a great deal of what anyone reads about the country in any language. Earlier this year we covered the 5 million euro modernisation plan and the new board's first decisions. This is the governance question underneath both.
