Zapatero, the jewels and an incomprehensible interview

Any politician knows that one goes to an interview with two or three strong ideas that, well articulated, should be the subsequent headlines remembered from that conversation. After sixty-five days, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero gave his first interview after being seriously indicted and chose a friendly playing field: a TVE turned into a socialist trench and Javier Ruiz as a referee who was correct and professional, but without making him sweat. Of course, I am not capable of offering a convincing thesis on what effect the former Spanish president intended: to act as a firewall for Sánchez, as a penultimate service to the cause? Because not even The Country dedicated a not-so-kind headline to him: “Zapatero defends his innocence without revealing the origin of the jewels”. As he detailed, he considered that he had to explain it first to the judge. But, if that is the premise, then what was he doing in front of a journalist and a few hundred thousand viewers? The interview has had prominent spaces on all the front pages of Barcelona and Madrid, but none of the headlines contribute anything to the case, because nothing, zero, zilch, is what the interested party clarified. Which forces the media to consider whether it is worth giving so much hype to a big bubble empty of content.

Meanwhile, on another set, a journalist claimed that those jewels were a gift from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Wouldn't it have made more sense to focus efforts on confirming this and the square centimeters of front page coverage to gather it? The case exemplifies how liturgy and dependence on politics devour instinctive judgment. Not opening the front page with the interview would have been a Martian option, agreed, but at its core there wasn't much to offer the reader. The paradox illuminates the tolls we pay in this era of infotainment television.