Blunders disguised as investigative journalism

Sensational headline in OK Diario: “The largest gay brothel of Sánchez’s father-in-law became a hotbed of filth and a refuge for a homeless person”. We should think about coining a term to indicate the distance between the sonority of a headline – here, the homeless person just needs to be an independentista to hit the jackpot – and the meager significance of what it portrays. We could call it the indes, this unit of measurement. Here, the factual news is that at the entrance of a closed building, a poor man set up his precarious cardboard shelter to sleep protected from the wind. It’s already strange that the very liberal Ayuso hasn’t granted him a certificate of habitability and a prize – free cane with tapa – for constructive entrepreneurship. And yes, the building apparently housed a place where male prostitution was practiced... but before the pandemic. The link between the prostitution activities of Sánchez’s father-in-law and the appearance of a homeless person who cannot even afford the luxury of personal hygiene is, at the very least, weak. The newspaper explains that the family maintained the lease of the premises until 2022, but there is no law that obliges you, four years later, to be responsible for cleaning the public highway.

OK Diario would not be news, of course, if there wasn’t a very thin thread that allows it to put Sánchez in the headline next to words with negative connotations and outside the formal register that should be required of an informational piece. If family businesses are murky – and indeed, the article suggests, without providing proof, things like child prostitution, money laundering, favoritism, or the use of hidden cameras – they must be investigated and, above all, proven. But what was there remained in the umpteenth barrage closer to trench warfare harassment than to real journalism.