'El Mundo' opens a front against Telefónica

The new president of Telefónica has made the usual move of remaking the company's leadership to suit his project. Most media outlets see it in a positive light and "revolutionize" is the most frequent verb that we can find in the headlines of newspapers such as The Country, Five Days either Expansion. It is a positive verb that conveys dynamism, action, determination. After all, Telefónica is one of the major advertisers, so it is understandable that, by default, it is given positive verbs or verbs that do not have negative connotations. That is why it is surprising that The World escapes from this beatific tendency with a clearly more punitive statement: "Murtra expels Pallete's core and increases control over television." Here we have already ended up in the semantic field of Stalinist purges and the Orwellian takeover of the media. The newspaper thus makes official that it considers Murtra's Telefónica as an ally of the PSOE and lets slip, as speculation, that it could opt for the open television that Joseph Oughourlian has rejected for Prisa. It will be easy to see: if the directors who have left the publishing group ofThe Country Because they bet heavily on the open channel project, they are now signing up for the telecom, it will be an unequivocal symptom that yes, there will finally be one more channel with a lot of political debate and that will be heavily weighted towards the socialists.

Nearly thirty years have passed since Aznar appointed Juan Villalonga as the new president of Telefónica, with the aim of helping him to oust Polanco as pope of communication in Spain. Pedro J. Ramírez rubbed his hands and already saw himself leading a new media empire, but it did not come to fruition. Three decades later, The World keep ruminating because the pendulums of regulated companies, alas, always end up coming back.