“It is dangerous for those in power to set themselves up as guardians and tell the truth”

Julián Quirós participated in the third and final day of the Autumn Conference, which Ricardo Delgado Vizcaíno Foundation organized in Pozoblanco, and which this year focused on the bicentenary of the birth of Juan Valera, on the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado and on disinformation.

During a session in which journalists were also present Alex Grijelmo And Juan Luis Cebrianthe ABC director wondered if a classic definition of newsthe one who says what someone somewhere doesn’t want to publish. “And I believe that yes, we must not let ourselves be carried away by recent tensions to forget the fundamentals.”

Today, we constantly talk about hoaxes in terms of information, and we suspect that they come from the press, understood as professional media, and this is not true: “Hoaxes exist, but they are made in outside of professional means, press. They were made either to weaken them, to communicate different ideas, or to mislead or harass the press. Saying that the media don’t tell the truth.

Julián Quirós insisted that they were born and function as “a lever designed against the press, but also against society and against democracy“. He also admitted that the press can be “extremely imperfect, with less and less time to resolve the problem and respond.”

“Making mistakes exaggerationshas a bias and gives it intentionality. This may be more or less rigorous, but the professional press does not consciously invent or plan false facts,” he defended.

He also drew attention to the reviews which, as he recalled, “are not good. They may be confused or criticizablebut hoaxes are false facts and not opinions that do not seem acceptable. “If everything is called a hoax, it’s downplayed.”

Disinformation is a big problem for society, Julián Quirós said, because “it destroys trust, and it’s not just a problem for journalists.” With the rapid process of digitization has become more pronounced, but examples like the Russian interference plot in Catalonia or the Bonaire parking lot in the recent DANA in Valencia, these are elements foreign to the traditional media system. And yes, “there has always been a yellow and sensational press, but it is different from post-truth and contempt for the truth”.

The ABC director also spoke of the plan announced by the President of the Government after his five-day retirement, Pedro Sanchezand which turned out to be “absolutely inoperative”.

In addition, he then put forward some reasons and problems on which, according to the Chief Executive, hoaxes have spread, such as immigrationvaccines and the climate crisis. “All these are hoaxes that were spread only on social networks,” Julián Quirós concluded, and this so-called Regeneration Plan “left aside those who made these hoaxes.”

“It is dangerous for power to set itself up as guardian of the truth and say what is true and what is not. In a dictatorship, power can dictate the official truth and, in fact, systemically, it determines what is information and what is disinformation. In democracies this is not possible, because the government’s point of view clashes with other points of view, regardless of which one is closer to the truth,” he said.

Risk of censorship

For society, admitting that power is the one that says what is true and what is not is giving it those with whom there may be a risk of political censorship. Speaking of censorship, he cited Miguel Délibéswho in addition to being a writer was director of the newspaper ‘El Norte de Castilla’, with a phrase: “The problem with censorship is not what it takes away, but what it forces to be put in.”

The “abrupt” change was brought about by the Internet and the changes it imposed, which led to situations that were very difficult to manage. New initiatives have also emerged, “some similar to the media and others very different”.

And the result of all this, the ABC director admitted, is “a significant loss of the strength of the media, which is the loss of the monopoly of intermediation“. “Now we are not completely autonomous, due to the sudden emergence of networks and a significant drop in revenues. In the press, it is an imbalance in favor of power and to the detriment of the press,” he warned.

The media have lost their influence and, in part, their control over the agendathe ability to decide what to talk about. What’s more, “power has more and more personnel who work in front of the journalists“. “We no longer decide what people should know. Even though there are still many things that people don’t know that we say, there are also things that people think they know that are not true,” he explained.

The press lives in a state of siege. “On one side is Googlewhich distributes 50% of newspaper content. But it is also “a direct competitor, which has monopolized advertising”.

On the other side, social networks, which have retained a good part of capturing the news. attention. “These are not means, because they have another logic. They have no editorial precepts and are driven by an algorithm. But one thing is how I see it, another is how I would like it to be and another is how citizens see it”, insisted Julián Quirós, who preferred to describe social networks as ” channel”.

Many hoaxes can come out of it, but what is more worrying is the toxicity, the harmful content. The ABC director concluded his speech with a warning: “If the media is not saved, the problem is not with the media, but with democracy as we understand it.”

He had already intervened Alex Grijelmocolumnist for El País and author of books like “The Journalist’s Style”, who spoke about one of the current problems, namely the proliferation of anonymity on the Internet, as a source of problems. It began with remembering one’s own name as a right for children and a source of fundamental information for one’s identity and, from this point of view, anonymity or hiding the name under a name false is above all a form of disinformation.

“A name is disinformation when it does not designate a truth, but rather the hidden. “I’m lying in the way I call myself,” said the journalist, who graphically summarized the internet’s strategy of concealment: “Hands in the light, face in the dark.” There have always been anonymous people, but on the Internet they have a desire to cause harm, precisely because they can protect themselves by not revealing their identity.

He gave concrete, concrete examples: “A ten-year-old child cannot enter a physical store sex itemsbut yes online, and even buy them, if you have your parents’ bank card. Anyone must identify themselves to send a letter to the editor, but they can write a comment without identifying themselves.

And from there he got to fake, or at least unverified, hotel restaurant reviews. The big platforms are dedicated to removing violent or hateful content, often of an extreme nature, but this means that there is also a lot of harassment, which hides in the phenomenon of the “motivated attacker” by anonymity. Self-regulation and limitation can help in the future.

Juan Luis Cebrianfounder of El País, closed the interventions by speaking above all about post-truth and the fabrication of the story, which is now crucial. “Today there are many more journalists who are dedicated to publishing good news and not publishing bad news, than there are journalists who are dedicated to investigating to publish bad news,” he said.

For post-truth, he gave examples: Donald Trump and Pedro Sánchez: “If lying means saying the opposite of what you feel, they really believe lies. » For him, “the biggest inventors of fake news are governments”.