The director of elDiario.esIgnacio Escolar, highlighted the coverage and treatment of the migratory phenomenon by the newspaper and assured that one of the objectives is to contribute to “dismantling” the speeches against this phenomenon, which are “permanent racism”.
This Thursday, Escolar participated in the round table “Directors: how to integrate content on migration into a major media”, within the framework of the VII Migration Journalism Congress held in Mérida. Also participating were the director of Público, Virginia Pérez Alonso, and the CEO of Bekane Media, Rodrigo Pinedo, who moderated the conversation.
Escolar defended information on migration as a “priority” for elDiario.es, which began its journey 12 years ago and did so with respect for human rights. “The Desalambre section existed when we did not yet have Culture or International,” he remembers.
For this reason, the newspaper has a team that has covered these issues “forever” and does so by “trying to politicize this issue because “they are not events, but have to do with political decisions and that is why we raise it this way.” “.
However, he also warned against the information processing of migration which is carried out with the aim of obtaining clicks, because the survival of certain media depends exclusively on the audience. According to him, this has led to “a distortion of the journalistic model and the generation of unwanted and poor quality content”.
However, elDiario.es is financed thanks to the help of readers, “92,000 members who demand that human rights not be dragged through the mud and that we do not treat them like idiots”, he said. -he declared.
On the other hand, Escolar and Pérez Alonso agree on the difficulty of some media in moving journalists to places where conflicts like the war in Ukraine are taking place, but elDiario.es has 17 local editions which constitute a “advantage for many coverages because we are already in the territory”, as happened with the migration crisis in the Canary Islands, Escolar emphasized.
The VII edition of migratory journalism, which this year did not have the collaboration of the regional government of Extremadura, as was usual, brought together for two days informants from around twenty countries, who analyzed issues as important as misinformation and the need to combat polarization and hate speech with quality information and new stories.
