Sliding with Juan Carlos and Jeffrey Epstein

The eagerness of certain types of media outlets to smear the names of their particular villains by linking them to Jeffrey Epstein continues to create awkward situations. La Sexta reported this Wednesday on an email supposedly from the pimp, in which he wrote: "I'm having dinner with King Juan Carlos of Spain tonight. Amazing. Dinner organized by Pepe Fanjul for friends." But in reality, it wasn't Epstein who wrote it, but rather the recipient. A woman was the one recounting this alleged dinner, which may or may not have even taken place. Once again, the rush to publish without a second thought and the laziness to verify information led to a blunder that other media outlets have been quick to reproduce: if La Sexta says it, it must be true, copy it from there and publish it. I reiterate the danger of publishing millions of documents en masse. A simple search by name is within the reach of practically anyone. The trick is to scratch and dig to see if that reference actually hides a story, or if we're content with the juxtaposition of the two names, hoping that, through cross-contamination, one will be tainted by the sins of the other. It happened a few days ago with Aznar, and now we're back with Juan Carlos. However dreadful we find both figures, this frivolity in discussing them not only fails to condemn them, but rather diverts the focus from where it belongs.

Once again, it becomes clear that the main ingredient of journalism is time. Because money can buy journalists' time to actually do their job. Never before has it been so easy to have tons of data at their fingertips. But this has become one of the main problems: the rush to publish and the tendency to mimic others are strangling investigation. The pressure for clicks leads to complacency once they've been obtained. Some naive person might even believe they've already reported the truth.