“Somebody who compares us to the radio in Rwanda clearly hasn’t thought properly about what that means,” said Ms. Terribas in an interview on Tuesday. “It breaks my heart to hear people talk about us like monsters who manipulate brains.”

But perhaps the outlet with the most at stake for Catalans is TV3, which was begun in 1983 as an ambitious regional television project that Catalonia’s leader at the time, Jordi Pujol, used to reinstall the Catalan language, which was banned under Franco’s dictatorship.

Since then, TV3 has spawned a generation of Catalan producers who built their own media companies, in both Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

“TV3 was a decisive element in the construction of the new Catalan identity and society that Pujol wanted, but it also became part of a powerful system of clientelism,” said Josep Maria Martí Font, a Catalan journalist and former foreign correspondent for the newspaper El País.

Antonio García Ferreras, who runs a politics show on La Sexta, a Madrid-based television channel, argued that Catalonia’s independence movement had been “light years ahead” of its opponents, in terms of promoting its separatist project on every possible platform.

“The same ideology has been sold in every clever way possible, including on TV3’s children and food shows,” Mr. García Ferreras claimed. “I think the independence movement is perhaps now a victim of its communications success, having made people really believe that independence could soon become a reality.”