I have already seen these covers. It was not a footballer, but a college athlete and a young man who played the piano. They both looked like two young men with a promising future, but They both suffered the terrible, irrepressible, very violent and very rare impulse to rape and murder a woman, respectively.
If only those women, according to the media narrative, had not crossed their path Can you imagine all that they would have achieved? It sure won’t cure covid-19, or cancer or HIV, possibly just being high-performance athletes and a renowned chess player – nothing modern man hasn’t done already.
It was the end of the summer of 2016 and Brock Turner, the young Stanford swimming promise that all the media was talking about, got out of jail after spending three months in prison for raping an unconscious woman. What did the headlines say? “Swimmer Brock Turner gets out of jail”. How shy, guys in the media: Brock wasn’t in jail for swimming and half the United States knew he was a rapist. Words what do I have them for if I’m not going to put them in a headline, right?
It’s scary, of course, that they call you a rapist. But, without a doubt, it is incomparable with the fear of being raped by a subject, that everyone regrets his truncated career in swimming (not the crime or the action) and that three months later he will come back to life with no guarantee that he will not. there will be repetition.
In 2014, a serious magazine from Mexico talked about a young man who played the piano, was a mathematician and oh, by the way, “he dismembered his girlfriend” in Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The story told the crude story from the version of the perpetrator, which by default was going to be flawed and the journalist did not touch his heart to think about what the relatives of Sandra Camacho, the murdered young woman, would feel when reading such a narrative detailed. Less, the ethics with which he worked was touched to talk about Sandra as he did about the femicide. Fe-mi-ni-ci-da, which pianist or what eight quarters.
So just by looking at the player’s photograph Renato Ibarra on the front page of sports newspapers, plus the unsavory, sad and apologetic puns for violence makes me think that the 2021 media: a) live in the past (in which these covers are also condemnable) and b) they are on the wrong side of history.
Let me explain: when the rapist Brock Turner got out of jail and not one media called him that and on the contrary they referred to him as “former swimmer” or “swimmer”, readers and readers complained to each media for not telling him what he was like. was. In addition, the media was criticized for placing greater emphasis on what the future held for Brock, rather than thinking about the future of the survivor of sexual violence who was a victim of Brock. When a man rapes a woman, it is not her future that is ruined, according to the media, it is that of the men, young promise.
The magazine in which the apologist story about the feminicide of Sandra Camacho was published admitted the error when elaborating and publishing the text and the journalist apologized and since then, I have witnessed that most of the serious media have made a great effort for not repeating this serious mistake.
However, during this week some sports media celebrated the return of Ibarra on their covers, Guilty of family violence to the detriment of Lucely Estefanía Chalá, his wife, after attempting on her life and her ten-week high-risk pregnancy.
I would like to give an account of the indignation I felt when I saw him as a star, but few events give me that indescribable nausea that I felt after seeing that the media leaked the image of Ingrid Escamilla unethically after her partner murdered her.
So I only have questions to the people responsible for that privileged, but wasted task right now, which is choosing a newspaper cover. Words are unnecessary, creativity usually overflows and language is not enough when it comes to forming a cover and even so decided to use words that would give double meaning that Renato is a puncher to talk about his return to the America and celebrate it with the most dastardly objective that journalism could have, which is: to sell. And not to sell to survive, but to sell at whatever cost.
“Coup of authority”? “Ibarra was reborn”? “Violent Left Handed”? Did the gentlemen fifas (said to be macho men, puppets without personality, who would hit something or someone in case their team – virtual or real – loses) of the newsrooms believed that people were going to laugh out loud when they saw this ” pun”? Did they think themselves the brightest and most witty when talking like this about a potential femicide?
As a journalist I know that words matter. The intentions. What is said, what is not. I am sure that those who are in charge of these decisions know it as well and that is the worrying thing, that they have no interest in empathizing with the victims and survivors of sexist violence. That their bubble is not enough for them to measure the impact that redeeming someone like Renato Ibarra, unpresentable, will have on our society.
Although it also makes a lot of sense: if soccer and the media are a reflection of our society, for a man to come out bragging about crimes of this caliber is normal in our justice and media system. According to a recent investigation by journalist Gloria Piña, every day 595 men beat, burned, strangled and injured women with knives or firearms in the last 8 years. It gives a total of 1.7 million cases for attempted femicide, however, only 781 investigation folders were initiated.
So yeah this week Mexican soccer and the sports media were a cruel reflection -the latter even part of the same problem- of this unpunished, femicide society that hates women and overlaps other men.
If you want to sell so much, sell yourself to another job, because having the arduous task of mounting a cover, headline and photograph is a job that is too big for you.
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