Cebrián settles scores with everyone (except himself)

A lengthy and excellent interview with Juan Luis Cebrián is published The WorldIt's a very pleasant conversation, full of swearing, in which they manage to loosen the founder's tie.The Country So that he can speak freely. So freely, in fact, that he doesn't realize that while he's firing shots left and right (against Sánchez, against those who fired him from the newspaper he founded, against Zapatero…) he's ultimately putting the noose around his own neck: no self-criticism, no admission of having been the media enforcer for the Felipe González era… It's exactly a Colombo interview, a Colombo interview, if only the criminals would put themselves in jail by letting them talk. Ah, the servitudes of ego. Like when he says that, well, actually, he wasn't fired, but rather that he wanted to leave. "I have a wife 34 years younger than me who was fed up with me working all day," the alpha male Cebrián blurts out. Cheer up, you can do it.

Another moment that left me speechless was when he claimed that he kept his distance from Felipe, but that Zapatero and Sánchez later turned against him. The question is obvious: what leverage did they use, if the newspaper he built was so well shielded from political interference? Cebrián also spends some time pitying the king—the third point of the Transition triangle, after himself and Felipe—in an attempt to elicit sympathy. One doesn't expect that, at 81, the most powerful man in the Spanish media for over three decades would commit public political suicide, but the interview's sheer lack of inhibition will stand as glorious proof of the self-congratulatory capacity of a generation that, without explicitly saying so, demands that the rest of the world still give them what they deserve.