Sánchez, Alsina and the revenge against the critical press

The week that opens the legislature summons the King to the opening of the parliamentary session on Wednesday, but also attributes him a representative role in the presentation of the Cerecedo award to Carlos Alsina this Monday.

The speeches that both are going to give are of interest, even more so when the second season of Frankenstein houses the pretension and expectation of revenge against the less sympathetic or affected press..

It has spread in the Moncloa that the dissenting media were about to ruin Sánchez's renewal in office. And the opportunity for revenge or a purge has been established, not only to punish the hostile scoundrels, but to neutralize them in the coming years and avoid new shocks in the…2027 elections..

The procedure does not require too much imagination.. The information discrimination with which the Government rewards some media and sanctions others predisposes the same criterion of advertising investment. There will be media blessed with the Administration's commercial campaigns, as well as exposed to the greatest political pressures and sacrificed in an exemplary way to institutional advertising..

The press is cleaner when it is less dependent on a Government, but a Government cannot and should not dissect the media based on the degree of meekness or bravery with which they react to political events and controversial decisions..

The President of the Government knows that the press is fragile with respect to new information paradigms and with respect to the viability of business models. And it has come to be agreed in Moncloa that it is appropriate to pressure and execute not only groups with a conservative reputation that are considered innocuous and irrecoverable, but also independent journalists who disagree with the glorification of Sanchismo.. Identify them, point them out, mention their names to expose them to the pressure of the public square and the troughs of social networks, with the purpose of creating an unhealthy atmosphere of intimidation..

The disgrace of the blacklist not only consists of the arbitrariness with which Sánchez's costaleros start sexing journalists like a farmer starts sexing chickens, but also in the democratic anomaly that restricting the counterpower of the press implies, whether it is or not. be hostile.

It is the same context in which the President of the Government outlines and defines the aberrant dimensions of the wall. His investiture speech—it is worth remembering now—both alluded to the opprobrium of the opposition and emphasized the denunciation of adverse media campaigns.. So alarming and relevant is the battle of good against evil, that it is urgent to define the coalition of darkness. Not only the PP and Vox. Or the judges. Or the fierce businessmen. Also the dissenting press. And the particular subjects who should be familiarized with a more aggressive legislature than the previous one.

Moncloa is not as bothered by the facherío media as it is by the tribunes and mass spaces in which upright or non-aligned journalists are recognized..

Alsina is a good example. The attempt to classify him as conservative is as ridiculous as attributing submission to Pepero dogmas.. Alsina is upset because his speech both responds to deontological obligations and obeys the substance of the argument and plurality..

Alsina is upset because she exposes the emperor's shame without fuss. Because he asks and editorializes with criteria. And because it portrays Sanchismo in its inconsistencies and contradictions, just as it once uncovered the dark areas of Marianism. Alsina is upset because the defense of some values and principles—incompatible with the Vox model of society, refractory to caveman nationalism—does not guarantee him mastery of the truth, but they do qualify his honesty, his rigor and his transparency.. And Alsina is upset because his qualities as an interrogator – between the Mossad and the Stasi – have turned his program (More than One) into a kind of militarized zone of exception – a minefield – that the representative positions of the Executive, as if they are afraid to submit to the truth serum and are afraid to say exactly what they think.

The Moncloa has a problem of democratic credibility not only when it differentiates with a brush the category of the press between the favorable and the adverse, but when it places on the other side of the wall the journalists and the media that cultivate the critical spirit and that exercise responsibly. the obligations of scrutiny and surveillance.

That is why it makes sense to rub Pedro Sánchez a passage from his investiture speech that alluded to the reactionary behavior of the opposition, when it seems like flashes from his own mirror: “You start, ladies and gentlemen, by denying access to certain media and “it ends up muzzling the judiciary and censoring the press, as is happening in countries governed by the right and the extreme right.”