The Isla-Puigdemont meeting upsets Spanish television.

It was to be expected that the meeting between Salvador Isla and Carles Puigdemont in Brussels would alter the biorhythms of Spanish news and magazines. Any link with he "escaped", "fled" either "fugitive" Puigdemont, the usual adjectives that always precede his surname on private networks, provoked a wave of media outrage. The nature of the meeting generated common threads of analysis.

The squeeze. In it Newscast 2 Pepa Bueno described the scene as "sober," but the other networks preferred to time it and consider that there had been excessive contact. Atresmedia's time was 29 seconds, and Mediaset's 30, a time that seemed to betray premeditation and malice aforethought. Some networks even slowed down the initial handshake, as if seeking an almost obscene recreation of the gesture by their protagonists. The handshake became a "long greeting between laughs", as they said on La Sexta. On Telecinco they used the great cliché: "It leaves no one indifferent".

Value of the encounter. The verb they used to describe the implications of the meeting was not innocent either. Antena 3 news Vicente Vallés practically wrote an editorial that oozed contempt. He considered Isla to be "consummating Puigdemont's amnesty." He also attributed the meeting with the power to "rehabilitate" the politician, and defined the visits to Waterloo as a gesture of "compliment" and "pay homage."

The abnormality. On private channels, there was also an insistence on highlighting the irregularity of that meeting, practically turning it into a perverted form of politics. "One of the exercises Pedro Sánchez has been most dedicated to is making normal what had never before been considered normal.", Vicente Vallés said, and he made a list of all the decisions of the president of the Spanish government that broke political logic.

List of meetings. Antena 3 news and Public mirror They also reviewed previous visits to Waterloo and meetings with Salvador Illa, suggesting the bad company he kept: beyond the pro-independence figures Torra, Aragonès, and Junqueras, they recalled Santos Cerdán, Otegi, and Yolanda Díaz. They also looked for images of the meeting between Isla and Jordi Pujol, who they recalled "is about to be tried for corruption," highlighting a kind of inertia on the part of the socialist president to approach less reputable counterparts.

The conversation. Beyond highlighting the absence of flags and replacing them with sad ficus trees as a disgrace to the nation, many news reports transcribed and translated the few words exchanged between Isla and Puigdemont before the press, seeking subliminal messages. The photographers' request to "take a step forward," which Puigdemont repeated, was interpreted as a sign of political will. The apparent cordiality in the superficial conversation also aroused suspicion.