The Asociación Collegial de Escritores de Cataluña (ACEC) has organized a conference in Barcelona to analyze the journalistic report today, with the assistance of Josep Maria Català, Pepa Roma and Juan Soto Ivars.
Marga Iriarte, Juan Soto Ivars and Eugenia Tusquets.
Text: Francisco Luis DEL PINO OLMEDO
On June 21 and 22, conferences were held in Barcelona on several of the most pressing and serious issues facing journalism and narrative, under the heading The language of manipulation organized by ACEC and sponsored by CEDRO. In the beautiful and harmonious setting of the Lord Byron bookstore, various relevant figures directly linked to the world of journalism, research and writing have expressed their points of view.
Moderated by the writer and painter Eugenia Tusquets and the researcher and writer Marga Iriarte, the sessions opened with the themes of reality as a pretext y lying as a reward.
Rome & Catalan
On the one hand, the Professor of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, graduate in Modern and Contemporary History, Josep Maria Catalá, who was Dean of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the UAB (2012-2016), represented a more theoretical position. And the journalist, photographer and novelist, Pepa Roma, directly attacked the current lack of context in journalism.
For Catalá, the image “has had a bad reputation since the time of Plato, unfairly”, referring in general to the job and the performance of journalists in the war in Ukraine. Pepa Roma directly accused that in the war in Ukraine “I see that the reporters are at the disposal of the military chiefs.” “There is no context,” he added. And he gave as a contrary example the good work carried out by The Economist. «In my time there was total freedom to investigate. The problem is that today journalists have become subjects of a business.
To which Professor Catalá reminded him of the unedifying performance of the British press during Boris Johnson’s period regarding Brexit, “which did nothing.” And he questions how newscasts are currently organized in Spain: “I speak with my colleagues frequently, and we ask ourselves where is what we have taught them at the Faculty”.
Both Roma and Catalá agree: in the cases of Trump and Berlusconi, both businessmen who controlled (or controls, in the case of Trump) the media, give the public what is convenient for them. “Those who manage the entire structure have tremendous power.
Pepa Roma influenced the belief that the journalist today is manipulated by circumstances. “There is no money to investigate.” “Experienced people have been wiped out. Newsrooms are full of cheap, uneducated people.” “There are no experts,” she stated emphatically.
Catalá agreed: “There is no, unless it is interested, investigative journalism.” And he adds that local journalism, in the case of social networks, “is perverted.”
Both Catalá and Roma wondered what can be done to rehabilitate journalism which, in the case of public television, “no longer complies with the premises” (deontological). Pepa Roma alluded to how the tragedy of the shipwreck in Greece a few days ago was treated on national television; while the British media, including the BBC, consulted specialists to determine the seriousness of what happened and its causes, “without showing a sentimental or morbid image.”
JM Catalá pointed out that this is an ideological debate: «In the United States there is a debate about whether the media can be objective. No, you can’t be objective.” “The solution is in education.” If Catalá appealed to a skeptical attitude towards the news on the part of the citizen, in order to be able to draw his own conclusions from it, Pepa Roma firmly demanded the deontology of journalism.
Soto Ivars against puritanism
The second day had the writer Juan Soto Ivars as a guest, who spoke about the two topics that closed the debates of these days organized by the Collegiate Association of Writers of Catalonia: Puritanism is not progressivism y The new weapons of creative destruction.
Soto Ivars brought an intelligent and apparently carefree attitude when it came to immersing himself in the proposed topics. He wanted to clarify from the beginning that he is not a journalist. «I wanted to be a novelist, what happens is that my collaborations in newspapers began to pay me well». He acknowledges that, on the other hand, he is closer to the figure of the researcher: «I am obsessive and disorderly. It gives me to follow topics that interest me a lot, but since I have not done any thesis, I am not a researcher either ».
He started the fire with the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI): “technology always makes its first decisions”. And he considered that there is a paradox with technology: the Internet, which was supposed to save a lot of time from reading mail, “turned out the other way around.” And “in social networks people fight”. He was convinced that those who create AI technology do not ask many philosophical questions. “We don’t know what will happen. The truth is that it will happen.”
On the matter of the call Culture of cancellation pointed In the case of the United States, especially incidents in universities, he opined that “you can bring down a professor or unimportant people, not what here would be a Pérez-Reverte or Pablo Motos. This can end anyone’s career. It’s very dangerous!”.
Soto Ivars considered that before social networks, people talked more; but now, with this channel of greater expression, it happens that there is fear of speaking and also of what others say. “Very contradictory things are happening.”
With respect to Puritanism, He launched his own definition “the desire for purity”, convinced that it responds to order, to the desire for everything to be in its place. “This happens in the media, we are in a time when Puritanism is advancing.” “Currently, we live in very annoying times. Because there is no threat, but it is created, by not allowing the other to recognize himself.
Soto Ivars, which has just been published no one is going to laugh, comments that in the plot the press is used to create a lie, to create an absurdity. “And they use the media to amplify that absurdity.” The novel could be, in his opinion, “also Kafka, because the protagonist is doing an act of irony.” Apart from many interviews, there have only been a couple of criticisms of this book. Nobody wanted to say (their opinion of him) from his own voice and sign the review ”.
In his opinion, “the capitalist world also creates nihilism”, and he gave China as an example. And about journalism, he stated: “TV has lost a lot, there is a very large degradation.” And since 80% of people receive the news by WhatsApp, Soto Ivars asked himself «for whom would good journalism be done? If people want morbid!» But, he defended that there are some little-known media where good journalism is still done.
2023-07-03 05:50:25
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