Spanish TV kicks bullfighting off the air

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MADRID — State-run Spanish television has quietly yanked live coverage of bullfighting from its programming, ending a decades-old tradition of showcasing the national pastime out of concern that the deadly duel between matador and beast is too violent for children.

Television Espanola's first broadcast in 1948 was a bullfight in Madrid. But for the first time in the network's history, none of its channels have shown live fights this season, only taped highlights on a late-night program for aficionados.

In practical terms, the unpublicized decision by the Socialist government is largely symbolic. Of the hundreds of bullfights during the March-October season, state-run TV only tended to broadcast about a dozen. Pay TV channels and stations owned by regional governments are full of live bullfights.

Still, many in the bullfighting world — and in the conservative opposition — are livid over what they see as a slight to a cherished piece of Spanish culture.

"We think it is awful," lawmaker Juan Manuel Albendea said. He said the center-right Popular Party will press Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to restore the broadcasts.

Promoters report that 65 million people went to bullfights in Spain last year, and that pulling them off free television is unfair to older people or those who cannot afford to go to the ring or watch on cable, Mr. Albendea said.

"Bullfighting is a spectacle that is alive, and spectators have a right to see it," he said.

Television Espanola said it had nothing against bullfighting. The station noted that it aired the running of the bulls in Pamplona, in which people test their daring by racing bulls through the streets.

But the network said it had to respect a voluntary, industrywide code that, without specifically mentioning bullfighting, seeks to limit on-screen violence or "sequences that are particularly crude or brutal" from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. to protect children. Bullfights often start at 6 p.m.

Mr. Albendea called the argument nonsense, insisting parents, not the government, should decide if children can watch a matador risk a horrific goring while stabbing a snorting half-ton bull to death.