Serbian Journalism / Do not consume
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- October 13th, 2017
"You facilitate the illustrations that I will put the war"
The response of New York Journal publisher William Randolf Hearstto his illustrator Frederick Remington , prominent in Havana following the explosion of the battleship Maine , is well-known , and he had telegraphed it:
"Everything is calm, there will be no war, I want to return."
It is the prestigious and historical version of our cynical "do not let reality fuck you a good headline" (originally was "reportage", but this is an endangered genre).
In the years leading up to 1898 there were newspapers in New York, not just Hearst's, which considered nothing like a good war and the exacerbation of patriotism to increase circulation.
At that time, in Madrid, and not only in Madrid, the newspapers, whether from Cánovas or Sagasta, demanded in the odd pages a hard hand from the Cuban insurgents, and in the peers they despised the intentions and military capacity of the Yankee upstarts.
In the circles of opinion and the gatherings of the casinos the doors that called to the action were jaleaban.
When blood boils, the target organ is not usually the brain.
As we now know, this is known as the Disaster of 98 and was, in medical terms, a national horse depression.
In 2017 there are no mambises in the Ampurdán, nor any foreign power longs to liberate Catalonia from the tyranny of the Crown of Spain to place her under her paternal protectorate.
But the role of a good part of the press, and not just the one that can be dismissed as yellow, is not far from the one that printed phrases like this one in Black and White in the edition of December 14, 1895:
"We are not looking for the enemies of Spain or the autonomies, nor the annexation, nor the total independence of the island of Cuba, but the extermination of whites, whether Spaniards or Creoles."
There were never so many banners in the news images and on the front pages of the press.
Those flags that for Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century were the last refuge of the scoundrels, and which Ambrose Bierce corrected a century later claiming that he was the first. Never have so many newspaper headlines made up of lapidary adjectives, manipulations and slogans.
Journalism, when it is, is to go, see, try to understand what happens and tell it later.
Not only to make the facts known, but also to provide the keys so that they can be understood.
In general it is more to ask questions than to give answers.
Provide judgment and not ammunition.
Point out the contradictions of the positions in liza and not the objectives that should conquer the side to which you ascribes.
It is to diffuse the confronted opinions , the different versions, instead of facilitating the coordinates of the enemy positions so that they can be bombed effectively.
It is not to incite a fight on the playground and record it with the mobile phone and then to have a cause for scandal in a gathering.
A means of communication, in short, can not be a pennant of coupling or enlistment for battles that, in addition, are going to free others.
If, as Arthur Miller said , a good newspaper is a nation speaking to itself, what we are doing here is shouting at one another, forgetting Machado's advice:
"To dialogue [to inform], first ask and then listen."
Perhaps you do not have to go back 100 years or skip the continent to find similar examples.
Only two decades ago, in Yugoslavia, we saw the tragedy that can produce the combined irresponsibility of political leaders and the media.
To trust that our Serbian press (public or concerted) to leave the vices of the worse journalism futbolero and to return to its terms is surely too optimistic.
So, as did the other day the Basque deputy Aitor Esteban in Congress, we invite our @ s reader @ s subscriber @ sa extreme caution and exercise critical thinking and media skepticism following the maxim of Cholo Simeone: do not consume.
