75 passes and 29 seconds deserve a front page?

“Delcy exhibits her access to Sánchez and compromises him in the middle of the UN”, exclaims El Mundo on its front page. “More than 40 meters in search of Sánchez’s complicity”, writes Abc. Let’s see, let’s analyze it with less passion and more numbers. I have counted the steps the interested party takes. There are seventy-five. They hardly count as an odyssey. They are, in fact, less than 1% of the 10,000 daily steps recommended to shake off a sedentary lifestyle. Delcy completes, in any case, her heroic journey and, before taking the arduous seventy-five steps back, she manages to speak for 29 seconds with Sánchez, who at that moment was talking on the phone. He hangs up with a look of commitment and it becomes evident that he brushes off the conversation as soon as he can. I don’t know if in the cavern they expected him to cover his ears with his fingers and say “Na-na-na, I don’t hear anything!” or some similar outburst. After all, in that same session we saw picturesque things like the president of Haiti trying to drink directly from the pitcher and pouring more water onto his jacket than into his mouth.

But it doesn’t matter. Those 29 seconds and the previous walk are sold as almost a courtship and the irrefutable proof of the PSOE’s understanding with this strange form of post-Chavism that is being sponsored by the global sheriff Trump, who as much threatens to annihilate an entire country as he drags out a president and locks him in his jail. Both El Mundo and Abc include four frames of this anodyne sequence, to give it more substance than it actually had. One already understands that politicians seek certain photographs, to prop up their narratives and build appearances of alliances with fleeting handshakes. But the press should exhibit a little more restraint and not join uncritically (or in bad faith) in this game of staging.