For news addicts, or while driving, shaving, home decorating or cooking, what better than the lively company of radio? But where on the waveband do we guiris tune in? Unless you’re a dab hand with short-wave radio dials - and don’t mind transcontinental whistles and hiss with your breakfast snap, crackle and pop - the choices here are in Spanish and Catalan, catering for most tastes: classical, pop, rock, funk, talk, sports and politics. Legion are the socialists who tune in religiously each morning to Iñaki Gabilondo on Cadena SER, and their no-quarter opponents are just as enslaved to Federico Jiménez Losantos on Cadena COPE.

Weird how Spain’s biggest radio station is hard-line pro-government and the number two generalist competitor is controlled by the Catholic Church. Forget notions of BBC-style impartiality (or attempts at it).

If Losantos and Gabilondo are a bit relentless for you first thing in the morning, try M-80 (FM 90.5, also a SER station), where the bright young things of No Somos Nadie take the mickey out of the day’s tópicos and spin MOR pop from 7.00 to 9.30 Mondays to Thursdays. It’s my number one preset on the car dashboard.

Listeners are dialling out of Catalan public radio in their thousands, turning instead to commercial stations and Spain’s RTVE national services. Catalunya Ràdio is going through a crisis with workers’ wage demand strikes, and the sister station Catalunya Cultura, taking 20% of the public radio budget, has a residual audience of only 6,000 for its regime of sardana coblas. This is extremely bad value for money.

And it raises the question of why, when taxpayers over-subsidise an evidently minority-interest station, is there no cash or bandwidth for public access programmes catering to Barcelona’s immigrant community. There’s certainly the demand and the talent to pull it off.

Businesswoman and star networker Brenda Franks, a Briton resident here for two decades, held a meeting with Roger Loppacher, General Director of Audiovisual Media of the Generalitat during Pujol’s last term of office, to investigate the possibility of a radio frequency for broadcasting in English in Catalonia. Absolutely not: the waveband is “too crowded” and any new licences would be granted only to Catalan language broadcasters.

The first obstruction can be bypassed by granting a licence on medium wave (AM rather than FM), which, while poor for music quality, is fine for talk radio. And the insistence on monolingual criteria seems absurd when Madrid , the Spanish costas and scores of European cities have English radio. Even where protectionist language quotas exist, foreign-language radio can thrive. Just look at the example of Paris.

The monoglot dog-in-the-manger posture here becomes more indefensible when several licensed Catalan broadcasters do nothing more than play unmanned music loops at the weekend. This bandwidth could be carrying vital, diverse and multilingual programmes instead.

Barcelona’s population is thoroughly cosmopolitan these days, and commercial support by immigrant communities would certainly allow for programmes in Tagalog, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as the major European tongues. Latin Americans? There’s terrific music on Gladys Palmera (96.6 FM), but it’s hardly community radio.

The same barriers to entry exist in local television. The redoubtable Alex Simpson, co-editor of the first English language paper in Catalonia (Guiri Total, in 1994, a whole decade before Catalonia Today claimed itself “First”) and an experienced media professional, approached Barcelona Televisió (BTV) with a proposal for a magazine-format programme catering to the sizeable English-speaking population here. The idea was rejected out of hand.

A symptom of the Generalitat Presidency Department’s fortress-mentality malaise, Catalan authorities and institutions are allergic to foreign language media unless they can control it. Managing editor of Catalonia Today, the government-sponsored English language weekly, is Carles Puigdemont, a Catalan separatist and signatory of the “Freedom for Catalonia ” movement. It is evident whose cultural and political ideologies are being promoted when the paper’s full-page adverts are placed mainly by Catalan institutions, in the Catalan language. In its first year of publication, Catalonia Today has yet to print a serious piece of investigative journalism, and most of its readers are indeed Catalans who receive the paper free at schools and colleges, while expats have to pay for it. And until audited sales figures are published, Catalonia Today remains what the industry calls a “phantom publication”.

That doesn’t bother Puigdemont, who is making a bid to monopolise the agenda for any future English radio too, and his friends in the administration are disposed to assist him: the government has already bought into Puigdemont’s Internet operation Intracatalònia S.A., supposedly a “private company” but loaded to the gills with politicians and answering to their personal and party interests. When Steven Burgen, Puigdemont’s puppet desk-editor, declares that Catalonia Today is not “in bed with any Catalan political party,” how does he explain the 90,000 euro subsidy of the paper by the PSC-ERC-ICV government? Without this handout, Catalonia Today would be as dead as a dodo.

To the detriment of diversity and the publication of real news, to those that have, more will be given. And in terms of media ownership, those who have most and are getting more are Grupo Prisa, Spain’s biggest (El País newspaper, Cadena SER radio and a subscription TV station Canal Plus, soon to go free-to-air with central government approval), who have just bought a majority stake in the radio station Ona Catalana and whose Localia TV network has already pre-empted local competition by securing licences in Barcelona, the Vallès district, Montcada i Reixac, Ciutat Meridiana, the Maresme, the Baix Llobregat and the Garraf.

And, as the biblical homily continues, to those who have not, even what he has will be taken away. Cue pirate radio stations, showing willingness and a proven audience, but who have been passed over at times of licence awards in favour of the amigos de siempre, the same cronies who picked up TV broadcast licences in recent handouts: the Count of Godó (gifted 12 million euros by the Generalitat in election year) and Justino Molinero (Pujol’s secret weapon to keep xarnegos in check), purveyors of late night porn, soft and hard-core respectively, on City TV and Tele Taxi; and Miquel “Mikimoto” Calzada’s Flaix (an MTV clone delivering paltry public service content, despite the channel being launched on the back of the concession awarded to highbrow cultural institution Òmnium Cultural). And while keen pirate broadcasters are being hounded off the radio airwaves, Catalonia’s broadcasting watchdog CAC describes City TV and Flaix TV as “alegal” (what they don’t dare say is “illegal”: the poodle watchdog would be savaged by Godó’s rottweillers at La Vanguardia if it barked too loudly).

Perhaps diversity and quality can be rescued in Catalonia by new technology, due in the form of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) once everybody has bought an appropriate telly. On 7th June, Joan Majó, head of the Catalan public broadcasting corporation CCRTV, announced that the prospective proliferation of digital TV channels should “allow for not just generalist programming, but content for specific groups of citizens.”

But don’t get too excited: the bureaucrats have already closed ranks to ensure that it will be a caza privada. Just check out the DTT links on this page. It’s not only the channels that will be ring-fenced; content providers will be funnelled through - or excluded from - two entrenched organisations, Barcelona Audiovisual and Productors Audiovisuals de Catalunya, who are to “promote amongst their members the generation of new content, formats and applications”. So much for the free market, diversity and, ultimately, quality and impartiality.