Journalistic self-control in Spain

María Rey is president of the Association of the Press of Madrid (APM). She is also the main presenter of the morning magazine 120 minutos on Telemadrid, a channel criticized by the works council and unions for following a line blatantly aligned with President Ayuso. The program is made by Ana Rosa Quintana's production company. Before that, she had spent almost a quarter of a century at Antena 3, a channel with a conservative profile. Mónica Tourón Torrado is secretary general of the APM. In her written press career, her time at the conservative Abc and Faro de Vigo stands out. Francisco Sierra is the vice president of the APM. He maintains a weekly column in The Objective where, week in and week out, he criticizes socialists. He also has decades of experience at Atresmedia. Luis Ayllón Alonso is first vice president and spokesperson for the APM. He has been diplomatic correspondent for the newspaper Abc and collaborates with media hostile to the PSOE, such as El Confidencial Digital. In short, I think the pattern is quite clear. Or, taking advantage of the acronyms of this entity, we could also say –with permission from the program produced by Antoni Bassas– that of... Any More Questions? Well no, there are no more questions.

I understand that journalist associations have complaint and self-regulation commissions: it is a good attempt to try to avoid supervision by other bodies that would surely be more censorious. However, in a country so politically polarized and characterized by harshness, it cannot be that guild entities also end up being perceived as partisan battering rams, quick to issue statements against some, but tremendously lazy and reluctant when it is others who have trampled on the code of ethics. The journalistic regeneration that Sánchez advocates should involve a deep debate about self-regulation bodies –serious, legitimate, wise– in the profession.