I'll warn you that I have no solution to the problem I'm raising. We often talk about the news media punishment that results from someone being judicially prosecuted, dragged through the front pages and news programs, but then is acquitted: the damage to their reputation is hard to repair. But there is an even more perverse effect, which is when someone goes through the courts as a defendant and, taking advantage of the fact that they can practically build their defense on lies, takes the opportunity to stir things up. "Aldama tries to implicate Sánchez without evidence in the plot", headlines El País, where the weight of the sentence falls on the weakness of the commissioner's accusation. But there are newspapers, of course, with fewer scruples. El Mundo opts for "Aldama floods the trial with details of illegal financing with Sánchez". We must applaud the newspaper's finesse: these details –a deluge, no less!– will surely end up becoming incriminating evidence in the reader's mind. But the truth is that even Eduardo Inda – unlikely to profess sympathy for Pedro Sánchez – admitted in a video that Aldama had not deposited any evidence in court to support his account.
Regulating this indirect news media punishment is difficult, although in reality the accused are not exempt from committing perjury. In reality, the problem is not their outbursts before the judge to gain protection from those who have let them down, but rather the drama is journalistic. The fault lies with the media that are not honest enough to record the absence of proven facts in resentful accusations. In fact, some had already been anticipating this smear maneuver for days, but it is impossible to scrutinize these campaigns, which take advantage of freedom of the press to abuse it. At the very least, it must be pointed out, because they harm the perception of journalism as a whole.
