The PSOE is finalising a regulation in Congress to curb far-right agitators

MadridDozens of journalists from the Congress of Deputies gathered on Wednesday at the Lions' Gate to denounce the behaviour of some far-right agitators accredited in the Lower House. Mainly, Vito Quiles and Bertrand N'Dongo, who work for the ultra-right media outlet Estado de Alarma TV (Eda TV). Their job consists of manipulating, spreading fake news and asking leading questions to politicians, skipping speaking turns and ignoring the rules of conduct that have been respected for years in Congress and the Senate. A working group of the Congress board led by the first vice-president, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, has been working for years on a reform of the regulations, which the PSOE will try to negotiate with the plurinational majority and take to the plenary session.

Last week the straw that broke the camel's back was the threats N'Dongo and Quiles made to a reporter from La Sexta, who they pointed out on social media for allegedly preventing her from working. The journalist simply told the cameraman (who was taking on the role of pool, which consist of distributing the images to all the media so as not to collapse the spaces) to stop recording how Quiles pursued a minister, already outside the area where the care is done in the media. There was a tense discussion between both and the journalists in the corridors of Congress, and the agitators even threatened to publish information from the addresses of the journalists. "The journalists who work in Congress suffer disqualifications, insults and accusations from accredited people who work with us and do not respect some basic rules of coexistence," says the manifesto that was read on Wednesday by spokesmen of the Association of Parliamentary Journalists.

Sources close to Rodríguez Gómez de Celis explain to ARA that the working group proposes some "rules of coexistence that guarantee the normal development of the informative work in Congress." The objective is not to sanction and withdraw accreditations, they say, although the new regulations will foresee it. The problem is that the current regulations do not regulate the reasons why someone's credentials can be withdrawn and, therefore, the lower house's communications department claims that it cannot act against the agitators. "It is the exercise of a fundamental right [that of information]," they say.

The main precedent in this regard dates back to 2020, when a reporter fromOK Diary He recorded images without permission in the premises of the Podemos parliamentary group. His accreditation was withdrawn, but a Supreme Court ruling forced it to be returned, arguing that there was no criminalization in the current regulations of the lower house.