The favor that Felipe VI is doing for Mazón

Perhaps it's inertia, perhaps servility, but yesterday the Madrid press missed a golden opportunity to break with protocol and demonstrate that journalism knows how to focus on the right thing, that it's close to the people. King Felipe VI graced the front pages of all four Madrid newspapers because he presided over the memorial service for the victims of the DANA storm in the Valencian Community. But the true protagonist of the day was Carlos Mazón. Specifically, his distraught face as he was subjected to a barrage of insults from the assembled crowd. A sorry figure who, we now know, is taking a few days to reflect. In Catalonia, the focus was clearly elsewhere: only The Vanguard It focused on the kings, while The Newspaper, The Punt Avui And the ARA focused on the theoretical protagonists of the act, that is, the victims.

Not many days pass before the Madrid newspapers feature Felipe and Letizia on their front pages. They do so as part of theestablishment They are, with the entrusted duty of protecting the institutional stability that the Crown is supposed to provide. But the presence of the King and Queen at all these events ends up being an interchangeable image, with no more value than showing the presence of the Head of State at that specific event. This inevitably overshadows anything unique about it, since semiotically it becomes the same as the classic institutional photograph. Mazón must have been pleased to see the day's front pages, because Felipe—without intending to, but also without avoiding it—has spared him the humiliation of forever immortalizing on a newspaper front page the ordeal of being subjected to a barrage of boos. I understand the symbolic importance of his presence, given its role as a supporting figure. However, the subservience of most of the press goes precisely against that theoretical intention. It's time to change that.