Racist pointing out and blaming the editor

Two Catalan boys, Ahmed and Youssef, have gone through an ordeal because someone took their photographs and claimed they were the murderers of an 83-year-old woman in Burgos. Far-right profiles massively spread their respective images to fuel racist discourse and, as always happens, rectifications travel slower than rumors, which roll and roll and travel much further. I want to focus, in any case, on the media outlet El Imperial, which was one of those that amplified this lie. The name, of course, says it all. “The identity of two boys completely unrelated to the case was published by mistake. The incompetent person who published the news has already been expelled from the media outlet”.

I have no idea who the incompetent person in question is. Nor do I care. The regular reader of this column will have noticed that I never talk about the author of a news story I am commenting on –unless it is an opinion column– because I want to focus not on the person, but on the structure that has allowed for such a disaster. And, in this case, the problem lies not with the poor racist devil who searched for two photographs of racialized people to feed the old xenophobic hatred, but with the media outlet that bought it without verifying. The incompetent one is the one who salivated so much that they forgot to ask themselves if it was true. Someone who wanted it to be true so badly, because that allowed them to confirm their prejudice. “We swear that an error like this will not happen again”, they wrote on social media, without explaining what they intend to do and what mechanisms they have activated to achieve it. Looking at their news feed, which focuses exclusively on criminalizing immigrants and anti-fascists, I would bet they will soon be repeat offenders. And that they will fire another incompetent person, if the first one even existed and it isn't just the pathetic attempt of an anonymous coward profile to dodge legal consequences.