Oh, Mr Feijóo, you really should tone down your catilinarians. Comparing the government’s information transparency plan with Franco’s dictatorship is a “cipotá”, what is called a notorious absurdity in eastern Andalusia.
Feijóo accuses Sánchez of persecuting journalists “like Franco” for implementing the European directive on the media
Alberto Núñez Feijóo opened the parliamentary session by accusing the government of Pedro Sánchez of censorship and persecution of journalists, in reference to the program to improve democratic quality presented the day before in La Moncloa. “Nothing like this has been seen since Franco,” he said.
Oh, Mr. Feijóo, you really should tone down your catilinarians. Comparing the government’s information transparency plan with Franco’s dictatorship is a cipotawhat is called notorious absurdities in eastern Andalusia. If this proposal deserves some criticism, it is for its modesty, a simple transposition of the European regulation approved in Strasbourg by the PP itself, and for the delay in its implementation, of three years.
Let’s see, Mr. Feijóo. It does not seem to me to be liberticidal that readers, listeners and viewers know who the owners of the media are that they usually follow and to which they usually give credibility. On the contrary, I am very wary of camouflage, opacity, lack of transparency. He who advances with the truth does not fear that his identity will be known.
Nor does it seem to me to be liberticidal to want to prevent local and regional leaders from financing their media vassals through institutional advertising, that is, with the money of all taxpayers. It costs us a lot to earn this money, so that instead of public services such as health care or education, this money is wasted on paying propagandists and preachers. Let every stick hold its own, let us, journalists and media, compete in complete freedom, without some of them letting themselves be doped up with our tax money by the grace of some vermouth queen.
Mr Feijóo, what I find absolutely liberticidal is that a rapper has been in prison for three and a half years for lyrics in worse or better taste about the monarchy. Or that a humor magazine receives, every two months, a complaint for allegedly hurting the religious feelings of lawyers who claim to be Christians. As a citizen and journalist, I feel gagged by not being able to say so politely and clearly what I think about the monarchy and religion. I have to bite my tongue in a Spain where, on the other hand, denouncing progressives in a crude and mendacious manner is considered a noble exercise of freedom of expression.
The thief believes that everyone is of his condition. Ayuso claims these days that the Sánchez government threatens journalists with its timid attempts to fight the mud machine. Excuse me, Mrs. Ayuso, wasn’t it rather your chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, who threatened elDiario.es to destroy it and close it? And there continues what is called MAR, collecting our taxes and dictating to you through the earpiece the cipota of the day.
This Spain of double standards in relation to the truth hurts me. Some of us contrast the news, others invent it with such richness. The economy is growing, jobs are being created, many foreign tourists are arriving, Catalonia is calmer than in the Rajoy era… All these facts are true and verifiable. This is the case of these: housing is the big problem of Spanish youth, the climate crisis is accelerating, sexist crime persists, we need immigrants and we must order their arrival…
But other types of things tend to reach many media and social networks: biased or outright false information, stories with political intentions. If you want to annoy the reds, the separatists, the feminists, the sexual minorities and the Moors, you can publish here whatever you want. For example, a North African can be accused of being the author of a crime, and nothing happens. Although the murderer is a Spaniard who has been unbalanced for a long time.
The media that publishes the headlines that Ayuso loves, such as that Sánchez is going to bring a quarter of a million Mauritanians and that she is financing with taxpayers’ money, have become like a hydra in the face of the measures announced by the government. He who chops the garlic eats, says the old Spanish wisdom. And these media are protected by the same freedom of expression that leads Trump to claim that immigrants go to Springfield to eat dogs and cats, our beloved pets. Ah, Goebbels once said it: the bigger the lie, the easier it is for the unenlightened to believe it.
The Government’s objectives to try to obtain a little more transparency in the media world and a little more freedom of expression for all are welcomed. They seem rather prudish to me, as I have already said, but the balance of power does not escape me. It is enough to recall that our private television is a duopoly: two large companies with conservative ideology own the majority of the channels that you scroll through when you press your remote control. How can we be surprised that they cry scandal at any attempt to reform the system?
Let’s always follow the money: he who pays is king. Albert Camus said this when asked why he left the newspaper Fight: “I left Fight, Madam, because, three years after its creation, this newspaper needed capital. And in the history of journalism throughout the world, capital never comes without servitude. So I gave up servitude at the same time as the capital, and I retired from journalism.
I have no intention of retiring, but I am too old to believe in fairy tales about the virginity of the media universe through the work and grace of the Holy Spirit.
