Pedro J.’s confession
It is public knowledge that certain newspaper front pages are masterminded by a partisan political brain, but it is remarkable when a star journalist openly admits that much
Ever since Operation Catalonia exposed the smear campaign against Catalan secessionist leaders engineered by Spanish officials and media, it is public knowledge that certain newspaper front pages are masterminded by a partisan political brain. But it is remarkable when a star journalist openly admits that much.
Pedro J. Ramírez, the editor of El Español and founder of Spanish daily El Mundo, acknowledged this while speaking on a radio chat show with an old friend of Catalonia’s, Federico Jiménez Losantos. Readers can decide for themselves: “Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría [Spain’s VP] plus Jorge Moragas [the PM’s Chief of Staff] are the ones pulling strings —media, law enforcement and so on— to try to present the facts in a way that is detrimental to Catalan separatism”. Holy cow! A careful reader would have already suspected something like that, but it is still shocking when you see it in writing. However, do not expect big headlines tomorrow: a modicum of online indignation and it’ll all blow over soon enough. We won’t stop the presses, either. At the end of the day, what Ramírez said is obvious to anybody with a keen eye. Do not expect us to do like Madrid daily ABC, which has recently discovered that the weather map on Catalonia’s public broadcaster shows a map of the Catalan Countries: TV3’s maps are as old as attempts by politicians to control media.
BARÇA’S CHAIRMAN IS SELF-CRITICAL
Josep Maria Bartomeu, the chairman of FC Barcelona, has been interviewed simultaneously for the second time in a few weeks by the two main sports newspapers in Catalonia, El Mundo Deportivo and Sport. Too much turmoil at the minute to miss the chance of getting four full pages in the most influential newspapers for Barça fans and gloss over the threat of a censure vote. In Sport Ernest Folch stresses that fact that Bartomeu is self-critical, a statement which —given the headline: “We have a better team than last year”— requires a closer inspection of the piece. El Mundo Deportivo echoes the same opinion and its headline reads: “We must be optimistic about this Barça”. Ángel Pérez writes that we must only “talk about football” and “come together for everyone’s sake”. If you are not into football: it means that now is not the time to criticise the club’s management. Cosying up to those in power is not exclusive of general news media.
