You know it's election time when TV3 begins the afternoon news with the hot breaking story that the portion of the Salamanca Civil War archive that was supposed to be sent to Catalonia has not been completely turned over.

Nobody but a Cataloony could possibly give a crap about where a bunch of seventy-year-old papers are stored, but they do. See, it's a symbolic issue. Cataloonies hold a tremendous grudge against Spain and everything associated with it, and so they are very easy to stir up for electoral reasons.

So Convergence and Union (who are generally moderate nationalists except at election time) has tossed a fit, and the Catalan Socialists (who are generally not very nationalist at all) have followed their example. They're just throwing raw meat to the Cataloony vote, of course, trying to show who can work up a more unpleasant attitude toward the rest of Spain.

What's censurable is TV3's choice of what news to report, what priority to give it, and what tone to give the story. In this case, they chose non-news, and gave it top priority and a belligerent tone.

All Catalan citizens subsidize TV3 with our tax money, and TV3 responds by serving as the propaganda outlet for extreme Catalanists. I'm not claiming there's a conspiracy here; I'm quite sure that the Catalan Corporation for Radio and Television churned out this stale whining all on its own, simply because the people in charge are who they are. And what they want to do is bring out the rabid Cataloonies at the polls in March.