María Rey is the 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 shamelessly aligned line with President Ayuso. The program is produced by Ana Rosa Quintana's production company. Before that, she had spent almost a quarter of a century at Antena 3, a conservative-profile channel. Mónica Tourón Torrado is the general secretary of the APM. In her written press career, her periods at the conservative Abc and Faro de Vigo stand out. Francisco Sierra is the vice president of the APM. He maintains a weekly column in The Objective where, week after week, he criticizes the socialists. He also has decades of experience at Atresmedia. Luis Ayllón Alonso is first vice president and spokesperson for the APM. He was the diplomatic correspondent for the newspaper Abc and collaborates with media hostile to the PSOE, such as 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 the permission of the program produced by Antoni Bassas– that... Any More Questions? Well, no, there are no more questions.
I understand that journalists' 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 presided over by bitterness, it cannot be that professional bodies also end up being perceived as partisan battering rams, quick to act when it comes to issuing statements against some, but tremendously lazy and reluctant when it is others who have violated 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.
