Lisbon, Oct. 16, 2025 (Lusa) - Portugal's minister of cabinet affairs said on Thursday that the new deputy secretary-general for government communication aims to give "more professionalism" to the relationship with the media, and that "it will be around for decades" and will serve "any party" and government in the future.
At the press conference at the end of the Cabinet meeting, António Leitão Amaro was asked about a report in the online newspaper Observador that the government is going to create a new structure to reinforce the coordination of institutional communication between ministries and strengthen its presence on social networks, in a model similar to that of the European Commission.
The new structure, formally called the Assistant Secretary General for Institutional Communication, will be headed by Daniel do Rosário, a former journalist and spokesperson for the European Commission in Portugal.
"I think they want our standards of government communication - as well as action, production, decision-making and the implementation of public policies - to be more demanding, more professional, more competent, and, by the way, more similar to what the best cases in the world, the best cases in democratic, free, plural Europe, adopt," the minister of cabinet affairs, who oversees the media, said.
Leitão Amaro noted that it was preferable to have a government with state support structures - but disconnected from the government - with "technical, professional resources", rather than "governments that spend, or would like to spend, tens and tens of millions of euros on communication agencies, or on hires to help with the task of communication".
The minister said that this deputy secretary-general's office, which was planned when the government's secretary-general's office was created, has "excellent professionals" who were initially appointed on a replacement basis, but who now compete through the Cresap (Recruitment and Selection Commission for the Public Administration).
"They will allow the country's government, be it this one or the future one, of these parties or others, to be supported with more professionalism. This means valuing public resources, valuing the capacity of the country's government to act with strict and scrupulous respect for the professionalism, independence and pluralism that the country demands," he said.
Minister Leitão Amaro was also asked about statements made by the PSD's parliamentary leader, Hugo Soares, who said, in an interview with RTP Notícias, that there was a need for "an increasingly critical spirit and scrutiny of the news that comes out".
"Because a lot of it is absolutely false. A lot of the news published in many newspapers that are sold to the Portuguese every day is false," said Hugo Soares in the interview on Wednesday evening.
Asked if he agreed with these statements, Leitão Amaro said he agreed that "all forms of power, in a democratic, free, pluralistic society, are and should be subject to scrutiny".
"When there are errors, abuses, failures, this scrutiny must be strengthened. Therefore, the idea that if there is fake news and where it exists, there should be scrutiny, scrutiny should be deeper, seems to me to be a formulation that I believe we should all endorse," he said.
The minister made a point of completely disconnecting this task from government action, referring it to the independent regulatory body that already exists, the ERC.
"If we think that it doesn't matter whether the news is true or false, that there is no line between disinformation and professional information, between quality information and rumours, we will be contributing to discrediting the democratic debate," he said, saying that he hopes that "the whole of society" can endorse the PSD parliamentary leader's formulation.
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