The veteran journalist Xavier Vidal-Folch He has had to rectify information in which he attributed a quotation mark to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, putting the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, on the spot. In reality, Vidal-Folch has not rectified, rather “they have rectified” him from the direction of his newspaper, since Pepa Bueno chose to remove the quotation marks in question, when Vidal-Folch confirmed that his sources confirmed that he did he had said that.
On the last day it was interesting to read and listen to veteran journalists from media as diverse as the director of okdaily Eduardo Indaor the director of THE OBJECTIVE Álvaro Nieto point to the possibility that, more than a mistake by Vidal-Folch, this could be a rectification by Von der Leyen herself in the face of a possible electoral victory for Feijoo. Especially relevant is the vision of the dire, who knows the European springs quite well for having spent a few years moving around those latitudes.
Background
On April 17, 2013, in the midst of the economic crisis, the journalist from The vanguard Carmen del Riego, who at that time was president of the Madrid Press Association, published as a headline some alleged statements of Maria Dolores de Cospedalat the time general secretary of the PP quite impressive: «Our voters stop eating before defaulting on mortgages».
They claimed that Cospedal had said that in a closed-door meeting before PP parliamentarians. Immediately the social networks put politics to birth, and the hashtag #COSPEDALHIJADEPUTA popped up. At 11:39 a.m. that same day, Dolores de Cospedal published a denial. “The statements that are attributed to me today are not true or textual, nor do they respond to the spirit of my intervention yesterday,” she explained.
Shortly after that denial The vanguard The headline changed and where it said “Cospedal: ‘Our voters stop eating before they don’t pay mortgages'” it went on to say “Cospedal: “PP voters are the ones who pay the mortgage”».
own Carmen del Riego appeared before the cameras The sixth at 12:30 p.m. on that same April 17 to make an impressive rectification, according to what they tell me, he did not literally say so. He said “our voters pay the mortgage“, he said that “our voters have a hard time making ends meet, but they pay the mortgage,” he said, “our voters tighten their belts, but they pay the mortgage.” Now, they tell me that “no one remembers stopping eating.” The final headline of the note was “The intervention of Cospedal.”
Another famous case also occurred in The vanguard in September 2015 when a veteran like Enric Juliana conducted an interview with Felipe González from which he gave the following headline: “Felipe González: ‘I am in favor of a reform that recognizes Catalonia as a nation'”. All of this caused an outpouring of criticism against the former president for giving wings to the ‘procés’, from the office of Felipe González, Joaquín Tagar He denied that in the interview the former president had made such a statement.
Enrique Juliana He then hastened to ensure that before publishing the interview he had sent the text to the former president’s office and that they had been told “no objection”, but Tagar replied by saying that the text that had been sent to him at the time did not include such holder. “The headline says something that Felipe González never said, he spoke of national identity, but never of the nation.”
Felipe González himself had to come to the fore: «I’m sorry to tell you that this phrase is not in the interview, I did not pronounce it and they did not even ask me that question. (…) I cannot ratify or rectify what I did not say in that interview, that is what I would have made clear today, if they had asked me about it, I would have answered, the question did not exist, nor therefore the answer that comes quotes in my mouth, in that interview that did not exist ».
It had worse professional consequences for Ramon from Spain publish a controversial interview in The country a Juanjo Puigcorbé in December 2000 where it put a series of quotation marks (starting with the headline ‘I’m too smart’) in which the actor put half a profession in the sector to fall from a donkey and that unleashed one of the largest and most brutal letters of rectification to an interview published to date.
In the end, it is impossible to know 100% what Ursula von der Leyen, Dolores de Cospedal, Felipe González or Puigcorbé himself said or did not say, if the headline changes are due to professional errors by the journalist or to tricks or stumbling blocks by the journalist. But they all have in common that they did not publish interpretations, but in quotes. And on the issue of quotes, newspapers, at least The country, They have very clear style guides: any conflicts about the correct transcription will be resolved with the recording y if this does not exist, the benefit of the doubt will be granted to the person to whom the quote is attributed.
When Europa Press attributed in 1993 some words to the academic Juan Luis Cebrián that he denied having said, his namesake José Luis Cebrián was able to prove with a recording that he had said what they attributed. If neither Carmen del Riego, nor Enric Juliana, nor Ramón from Spain, nor today Vidal-Folch, have audio, the quote becomes a boomerang for it.
2023-07-20 09:56:59
#headlines #style #books
