This is confirmed by the latest audience studies. The nationalist viewer calms his anxiety on TV3, the public catalan TV. Even before the disconnection laws and the illegal referendum, the public television of Catalonia, with its unequivocal independence bias, was the favorite of nationalism. Then, during those convulsive days, the secessionist public eagerly searched for the media repercussion of the challenge in left-wing national media and critics of the right-wing government (read "La Sexta") and in international newspapers that would have been carried away by the apparent good sense of the nationalist leaders and graphic violence increased by the fake news.

But in the absence of international support and the widespread criticism (of both the form and substance) of the separatist action, the pro-secession public has been increasingly orphaned by means that endorse or at least excuse the actions of Catalan nationalism. The newspapers that sympathized with the cause of independence now question it, the leaders who supported the "exiled" Puigdemont now don't want to be photographed with him, and the televisions that assumed the nationalist mental framework are increasingly distancing themselves from actions that have little to see with the beautiful words with which they adorn themselves.

Result of this is that the nationalist viewer is assailed by the frustration that so many times the former Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy, warned (in what was undoubtedly one of his very few successes). And that frustration, that distance between the manifest reality and the expectations created, only finds relief on TV3 and channel 3/24, as well as on Catalunya Radio.

Without TV3, nationalism would have been beaten by blows as forceful as the resolution of the Strasbourg Human Rights Tribunal against the denunciation of the independentist parliamentarians, which not only denies any violation of their rights but disqualifies the presumed democratic foundations of the referendum of 1 October. But, once again, they have TV3, recycling one of those reports that question the preventive detention and that has been prepared by a small UN collaborating group, showing it in prime time as if the United Nations itself, in plenary session, demanded that Spain release the "political prisoners".

Indeed, the channels of the CCMA, fiefs of the tireless Pilar Rahola and Monica Terribas, are still the (yellow) color filter through which the pro-independence viewer can follow the trial of "procés" innocently thinking that who is being judged is the "Spanish state". This viewer would suffer a real anguish when watching the raw live streaming of the trial, the demolishing arguments with which the Mossos (and even the TV3 directive itself) dismantle the weak defenses of the accused. It's necessary the skilful editing of the nationalist television and the triumphalist comments of presenters and commentators of same sign and color (yellow again) so that the nationalistic viewer can breathe with more calm and continue thinking that nothing happens, that "we're almost there".

In the absence of the hard drug that for seven years the nationalist has received in vein, this methadone allows him to move away from the shadow of depression, that fall that inevitably follows a state of prolonged euphoria induced by artificial means.

Of course, methadone is better than the withdrawal syndrome, aggressive and violent, experienced by those who TV3 no longer does any effect, to those who go out and see that their republic does not exist. Because that reaction can be dangerous.