The Seventh, an ideological hamster wheel
On Thursday, La Séptima, also known as Telesánchez, premiered. The network's logo even shares the corporate red that identifies the PSOE. The ideologue behind the television approach is José Miguel Contreras, who was already the creator and founder of La Sexta. He didn't have to rack his brain. La Séptima is as if you were entering a loop of Al rojo vivo from La Sexta that stretches throughout the day, from twelve noon to one in the morning. There are not even news bulletins. It is an eternal talk show. A single set and a single table. The presenters pass the baton to one another. Only the colors of the graphics change so that it seems like a different program, and the pundits. Pundits who, for the vast majority, are the ones we already see on the other networks. Just like in the beginnings of La Sexta, the network has been inspired by the visual approach of Fox. There is an evident gender hierarchy in the distribution of the protagonists. Everything revolves around a male reference figure who leads the television project. Javier Ruiz occupies the prime time and is also the head of programming. The rest of the schedule is shared by a cast of female presenters cut from the same pattern. They all adjust to hegemonic beauty standards; they seem selected not only based on professional criteria but also aesthetic and stylistic ones. An Instagram-inspired mold that makes them almost interchangeable figures. La Séptima projects an extraordinarily limited representation of what a woman should be like in front of the camera. With male faces, there is not the same physical requirement.
Javier Ruiz opened the broadcast by addressing the viewers and revealing the guts of the network: “It hasn't been easy. They haven't made it easy for us, but we are here now”. He announced the two fundamental axes of the channel: live coverage and journalistic honesty. And, with unheard-of demagoguery, he made a request to the audience: “Do not let us become everything that we have come to fight against. Do not let us become everything that we have come to change”. A propaganda of its difference that, in reality, has no singularity. La Séptima is a machine for the permanent construction of opinion: “We have come to change points of view, to change the conversation, to pluralize the debate”. They promise to provide “a different honesty to the profession”, which is a euphemism worthy of an award for journalistic juggling. Beyond its emptiness, it reveals a taste for distorting elementary concepts of journalism. It is a rhetorical formula to sell a supposed ethical commitment, but, at the same time, it turns honesty into a simple advertising imposture. “Here, data will kill the narrative”, Ruiz stated from a network of perpetual debate.
La Séptima, apart from messing up our remote control, is like a hamster wheel created in desperation to intervene in the electoral campaign and prepared to face a change in the political cycle. An ideological gear that has aspirations to mobilize the electorate. José Miguel Contreras has said that it is a new way of doing television, but in reality, it is the same system as always to construct political narrative.
