The appearance of the website called Menjòmetre, which allows for easy quantification of subsidies and other public funds for a company or entity, has generated some criticism from journalistic media. It is accused of favoring populist discourses from the far-right and of creating confusion by mixing the turnips of canteens with the cabbages of essential contributions if one wishes to maintain culture or the third sector. I do not find these criticisms unfounded, but I do think it is like hitting a wall looking for the forest.
Although the technical explanation of the project states in bold that the score obtained “does not indicate any irregularity, misuse, or moral valuation of the entity”, it is evident that a name like menjòmetre invites demagoguery and criminalizes subsidies wholesale. Now, having said that, the application should be seen as a useful tool that journalism can rely on to work with and add value, context, and rigorous framing. My profession has led me down other journalistic paths, but I still remember, after leaving university, at La Marxa d’Osona, reading the printed edition of the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat every afternoon, to see if anything promising appeared among all the administrative fanfare. What I would have given to be able to perform searches without having to trace that inferno of bureaucratic prose with my finger and hunched over the pages… Applications of this kind allow for saving time spent sifting through strings of official announcements, often incomprehensible, to do the real work: contrasting and explaining it to the citizen honestly and accurately. In the end, journalism must row in favor of transparency, including its own, and assume that AI speeds up the work but increases self-demand. Criticizing what, on the other hand, is inevitable can end up seeming like an exercise in complacent corporatism and lead us to end up scoring high on the desmenjòmetre.
