Spain
Spain's political and media landscape has been marked by heated debates over digital platforms and disinformation. The Socialist government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has pushed for stricter online regulation to curb false information, in step with EU-wide initiatives. Opposition parties view these moves as threats to free speech.
As part of these efforts, in March 2026 the government announced the launch of HODIO – an AI-driven tool designed to track the spread of online hate speech and polarisation across major digital platforms, aiming to enhance oversight of tech companies. The opposition warn it could become a tool for ideological control or to label dissenting opinions as ‘polarisation’, while raising concerns about who defines what qualifies as hate speech within the algorithm.
The initiative takes place against a challenging backdrop for Sánchez's minority government, which relies on fragile parliamentary alliances while facing investigations into alleged government corruption.1 Leaks and probes have intensified 2026's political clashes. Left-leaning media portray scrutiny as a right-wing ‘lawfare’ conspiracy, while independent outlets defend their watchdog role. In this polarised climate, tensions show little sign of easing.
Between 2025 and 2026, the Spanish government has promoted several significant media policy initiatives. The most significant is the Bill on Public Sector Advertising, requiring media outlets to disclose their ownership and cap public funding at 35% of total income to strengthen transparency. The government’s declared aim is to prevent regional or local authorities from financing ‘pseudo-media’ lacking commercial viability or significant audience reach, in line with the spirit of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). The opposition Partido Popular (PP) and Vox oppose the initiative, describing it as a potential tool for discriminatory treatment or what they term ‘soft censorship’, and its future is uncertain.
Other changes include a new Law on the Right of Reply. It would cover influencers with more than 100,000 followers, as well as others with more than 200,000 users across multiple social networks, adapting right of reply and correction procedures to the digital environment. Together, these proposals are presented as part of Spain’s effort to align its legal framework with the EMFA.
Amid this tense climate, the public broadcaster RTVE has experienced a turbulent year. In January 2026, RTVE's News Council published a 144-page report2, produced after over 100 staff complaints, alleging that certain news programmes had ‘habitually and repeatedly’ violated the corporation's journalistic standards. The main accusations pointed to political bias favouring the government and the Socialist Party’s (PSOE) arguments; deficiencies in journalistic rigour; failure of presenters to act as impartial moderators; dissemination of false information; and loss of editorial oversight due to the outsourcing of programmes to external production companies. RTVE’s management refuted these allegations, questioned the report’s methodology, and demanded a public retraction. The Board of Governors subsequently backed management’s position, approving a counter-report and referring the matter to a future board meeting.
According to InfoAdex,3 Spain's advertising market closed 2025 at €12.7bn, a 2.6% decline ending five years of growth. Television remains the leading medium, with investment of €1.8bn, 28.5% of the audited market (-4.4% on 2024). Atresmedia (with channels such as Antena 3, La Sexta, and Onda Cero) leads with advertising revenue of €621.8m (-9.5%), with Mediaset España just behind with €615.8m (-9.7%). Mediaset is cutting costs after audience figures fell sharply and its leading channel Telecinco started 2026 with one of its lowest figures to date.4 The plan includes merging the news operations of its two national channels, Telecinco and Cuatro, into a single newsroom while retaining distinct on-air brands, alongside significant cuts to its regional newsgathering network.
Newspaper advertising remained flat at €750m, 12% of media spend, with online news overtaking print, with €412.5m, compared to €337m. On the subscription front, media companies’ figures show Spain now has slightly over one million digital news subscribers. El País leads with 451,000 digital subscribers, followed by El Mundo (181,000), and La Vanguardia (167,000). Meanwhile, Prisa, Spain’s leading news publisher, appointed Jan Martínez Ahrens as a new editor of its flagship newspaper, El País, as part of a strategy to drive growth in the Americas.
Technological innovation in newsrooms has benefited from government-backed digital strategies and subsidies. Leading outlets have increasingly adopted AI tools for personalised news recommendations, fact-checking – such as El País’s collaboration with Maldita.es and other fact-checkers – and generating chatbots for subscriber support, alongside exploratory uses in content workflows.
Roncesvalles Labiano, Aurken Sierra, María Fernanda Novoa-Jaso, and Alfonso Vara Miguel
University of Navarra
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
This year the figures for news use across all four major sources – television, social media, online, and print – remained stable.
Pay for online news
9%
(-1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
37%
(-)
Trust in news overall
33%
(+2)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news, at 33% (+2pp), puts Spain in the middle of the 48 markets surveyed. Most brands saw trust increase, but trust gaps between left- and right-leaning respondents still exist for most media brands, reflecting polarisation.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
29/180
Score 75.42
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/29/spains-pm-was-at-level-one-in-scheme-to-rig-public-contracts-defendant-in-graft-case-says
2 An RTVE internal organisation, elected every two years by its own journalists to safeguard editorial independence and impartiality.
3 InfoAdex Study of Advertising Investment in Spain 2026.
4 https://elpais.com/television/2026-03-08/historia-de-una-crisis-televisada-telecinco-trata-de-recuperar-su-identidad-y-la-audiencia-fugada-siete-anos-despues-de-perder-pasapalabra.html