The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on British ministers to get tough on social media giants to stop disinformation. The plea comes after the publication of a study which found that hostile narratives against immigration have soared, linking it to a (false) increase in criminality in the city. Specifically, in the last two years, messages describing London as a particularly dangerous place have increased by between 150% and 200%, while content denouncing the impact of migration on the country's capital has risen by 350%.

María Rey is president of the Association of the Press of Madrid (APM). She is also the main presenter of the morning magazine 120 minutos on Telemadrid, a channel criticized by the works council and unions for following a line blatantly aligned with President Ayuso. The program is made by Ana Rosa Quintana's production company. Before that, she had spent almost a quarter of a century at Antena 3, a channel with a conservative profile. Mónica Tourón Torrado is secretary general of the APM. In her written press career, her time at the conservative Abc and Faro de Vigo stands out. Francisco Sierra is the vice president of the APM. He maintains a weekly column in The Objective where, week in and week out, he criticizes socialists. He also has decades of experience at Atresmedia. Luis Ayllón Alonso is first vice president and spokesperson for the APM. He has been diplomatic correspondent for the newspaper Abc and collaborates with media hostile to the PSOE, such as El Confidencial Digital. In short, I think the pattern is quite clear. Or, taking advantage of the acronyms of this entity, we could also say –with permission from the program produced by Antoni Bassas– that of... Any More Questions? Well no, there are no more questions.

Not the Com si fos ahir from TV3, nor the best of Turkish soap operas: the week's serial has been the tug-of-war between José Manuel Villarejo and Javier Ruiz. “Javierito, we've been such good friends in the past... Unbelievable!”, the ex-commissioner snapped at him live. The other jumped like a spring and assured that it was a lie and that they didn't even know each other. But Villarejito has everything saved and, a few hours later, his friend Eduardo Inda published in OK Diario a very brief fragment of a phone conversation in which the journalist, when his interlocutor told him he was bothering him, told him: “Don't bother me. We'll talk and, if there's any news we're going to release, I'll let you know”. The presenter of Mañaneros 360 on La1 had to admit that he had forgotten this conversation.

The Kitchen case is being judged and one of the accused is the one who in this column I called for a time Minister of the Past, due to the sinister echoes of past eras that it evoked in me. Now the prosecutor is asking for 15 years in prison and 33 years of disqualification, and the newspaper La Razón has activated all its machinery to try to dilute his possible responsibility. Let's remember that the former minister collaborates with the newspaper and that the director of the medium, Francisco Marhuenda, was appointed honorary commissioner during his term. The most hilarious piece, out of desperation, is titled “The Kitchen case evidences the political X that never sits on the defendant's bench.” It is evident that X, in this country and universe, undeniably refers to Felipe González, whom many assumed was the one embodying the unknown in the GAL equation. Therefore, the headline is a trench stab at the then president, Mariano Rajoy, with the attempt to make people believe that Fernández Díaz was merely a pawn – a mandao– who executed the order to spy on Bárcenas, which originated “from Moncloa” as suggested.

The arrival of the last quarter of the season has led different channels to question their bets in order to round off their audiences. Two of the channels where more movements are observed are La Sexta and La1, both with a more openly progressive tendency. The signing of Marc Giró by the Atresmedia group –to present a late night show titled Cara al show– has caused a chain effect and there are already half a dozen professionals identified with progressive positions who will premiere a program in the coming weeks. These are some of the upcoming additions.

Arturo San Agustín explained the tribulations of a reporter who, after spending half an hour deciding whether to spell it Gorbachov or Gorbachov – this was before the internet, of course – ended up assigning him the position of President of the United States. The anecdote is a fable about the inevitability of typos: when you look to one side, it ambushes you right there. The "New York Times" published a headline on both sides that read: "A North America Treaty Organization without America?". Once it was printed, they realized that the N in NATO doesn't stand for North, but for North Atlantic. Consequently, a good part of the headline's intention is lost.

From Maria Rovira, also known as Oye Sherman on stage, we knew she was tremendously witty and fun thanks to her monologues and media appearances. With Garlanda, her first book, she proves that she can also channel beauty and sensitivity through words, without ceasing to make the reader smile, and also laugh, with her intelligent and imaginative gaze. Edited by Blackie Books, it arrives in bookstores on April 8.

The giants of artificial intelligence face the same moral dilemma that confronted social media two decades ago, when they began their rapid expansion: responsibility or profits. And we already know what they chose. I read that OpenAI has decided to withdraw Sora2, the application that allowed the creation of realistic videos with utmost ease. The result of this ease? According to the Brazilian fact-checker Aos Fatos, four out of ten videos made with this tool that went viral spread diverse disinformation, often about supernatural disasters or public safety issues. But the company also responsible for ChatGPT has not canceled the service due to an attack of responsibility: it simply wants to put its eggs in another basket, that of trying to integrate AI into robots to solve physical tasks. At least, since the computing requirements are not as intensive as hundreds of thousands of lunatics trying to poison the networks, there will also be an environmental benefit, in addition to the informational one.

The appearance of the website called Menjòmetre, which allows for easy quantification of subsidies and other public income for a company or entity, has generated some criticism from journalistic media. It is accused of favoring the populist discourses of the far-right and of creating confusion by mixing the turnips of canteens with the cabbages of essential contributions if one wants to maintain culture or the third sector. I don't find these criticisms unfounded, but I do find that it's like running headfirst into trees while looking for the forest.

Eureka! I have finally found the key to that Mecano song that said “And that something that is myself is a bifrontism painting that only shows one face”. José María Cano was talking about the Spanish press, specifically when talking about the economy. The march of a country, from the point of view of the numbers, can be expressed with so many different figures that you just need to choose the right one according to each person's editorial weaknesses to paint a luminous Monet or a tenebrous Caravaggio landscape. In La Vanguardia, today happy violins played to announce that “The deficit falls to 2.2%, the lowest in 18 years”. On the other hand, in La Razón the most apocalyptic metals vibrated with the headline “Public debt reached the historical annual mark in 2025: 1.689 trillion”. Both figures are correct, but it is evident that they impact the mood in opposite ways.

It is a kind of press Stockholm Syndrome: victims tend to want to resemble their executioners, to see if by imitation they can avoid the scythe they fear. In its attempt to ingratiate itself with the new generations, the Washington Post has for two years been promoting, under various names, what they call "the third newsroom". It is assumed that the first two are dedicated to information and opinion – two fronts that, in Anglo-Saxon journalism, are usually separated by a firewall wider than Aznar's mustache –, and that this third one would correspond to what we usually call content creators. They strive to say that the standards of rigor and verification must be the same, in a clear show of "excusatio non petita". It is evident that today's journalists must know how to adapt to new audiovisual formats and that there are personalities on social media quite capable of acting with journalistic methods. But for the newspaper to now be inflating itself by hiring flashy people on social media while recognized journalists leave is, to say the least, disturbing. The problem of the Washington Post", in fact, is the thinning of its journalism since Jeff Bezos decided to ingratiate himself with Trump. And the owner's interference in the editorial line to safeguard larger economic interests. In recent days, up to fifteen of its articles were agency teletypes. This is an unprecedented proportion, as this used to be the only recourse for a newspaper well-supplied with correspondents across the country and the world. Making videos on social media can be a good way to connect with new audiences, and the Washington Post was a pioneer years ago on TikTok. But everything suggests that it is looking for the umpteenth substitute to hide the weakening of the newsroom from the outside. Another bad piece in the fabric of an institution that is touched, but we hope not sunk.

RAC1 is enjoying a sweet moment, having chained together three waves of the EGM where it has surpassed one million listeners, but this Monday it also wanted to look back and raise a symbolic toast to two of the architects of the station, who died in recent months. These are two of the co-founders of Grupo Godó's radio station, Carles Vilarrubí and Eugeni Sallent, the latter of whom was also its first director. Thus, the Tots Som 1 award – the station's slogan and which previously decided the audience – changes its modality this year to present this posthumous recognition.

Bill Keller directed the New York Times between 2003 and 2011, a turbulent period in which the press endured the extreme shock that the popularization of the internet among the general public represented for the media. Among its peculiarities is having written a letter to the editor... to his own newspaper. He wrote it in response to an opinion column he himself had commissioned. The newspaper had appointed him head of the newsroom following the Jayson Blair scandal, who had committed fabrications and plagiarism in dozens of his articles. To try to start the new era with a clean slate, he asked conservative judge Richard Posner to diagnose the ills plaguing the press. The article, alas, did not please him: in one passage, the judge asserted that blogs had better error correction methods than conventional media, larger and therefore slower and subject to a complex vertical network of interests. As is understandable, vetoing the column would have meant agreeing with him, so he wrote a letter to the editor, meaning to himself, criticizing the judge's article as "tendentious and cynical" and reminding him that, in fact, the publication of his acid commentary was the clearest refutation of his theses, according to which the press silenced what was not convenient for it.

Right-wing newspapers have a rather endearing fondness for anticipating disasters when the PSOE is in power. You only have to look at the successive apocalypses they've predicted every time the minimum wage has been raised, which, like the end of the world announced by the Maya, have ended up being a damp squib. Today we need to talk about the opposite effect. Several newspapers today note the 3.3% inflation recorded in March, as a consequence of Donald Trump's narcissistic whims and the consequent rise in fuel prices. In contrast, the headline in El País was “The Bank of Spain warns of another inflation crisis if the war drags on”. It's quite curious to lead with a prediction conditioned on a reality that is already impacting people's pockets and which, for the first time, is becoming apparent in a figure. Even La Vanguardia, which usually applies bandages before Sánchez's wounds, headlines with the inflation scare and waits for the subtitle to apply the antiseptic: “Anti-crisis measures have prevented a greater economic impact”. This doesn't mean the cave dwellers aren't dwelling in their caves: everyone explained that it was the war that was driving inflation, except for El Mundo. Heaven forbid they spare Sánchez some blame. 

It shouldn't be so hard to leave the dead in peace, especially those who have voluntarily decided to end their lives. But Noelia Castillo's euthanasia has become a media and, also, political issue: the most conservative right has come out in force to criticize it. Some did so while the young woman was living her last hours in the world, like an individual from the digital ESdiario who, invited to Sonsoles Ónega's program, dared to judge whether the applicant was suffering enough or not, or if she was physically disabled enough. This Friday, in Abc, Carlos Herrera resorted to the practice of placing the moral burden of this death on the government's shoulders. "That the only help the State offers to someone who is suffering is death is an ethical defeat," he wrote. But a few sentences later, he sabotaged his own article when he recalled that "the same Generalitat de Catalunya that operated on her, rehabilitated her, and helped her climb stairs is now killing her." That is to say, he unwittingly admitted that the State had indeed helped the young woman in multiple ways, that she had been in shelters several times. And euthanasia, which they presented almost as an execution, was nothing more than final assistance. I suppose criticizing the Generalitat was too easy a temptation to pass up.

I am writing these lines when there are only a few hours left for Noelia Castillo, if there are no unforeseen events, to see her wish for assisted death fulfilled. The young woman granted an interview to Antena 3, and therefore accepts the mediatization of her case, but there are some coverage points that are difficult to digest. At Ok Diario, smelling blood and clicks, they have launched into creating content galore. Some try to pass themselves off as investigative journalism, as when they headline "Noelia Castillo will receive euthanasia today despite not being paraplegic: she walks with difficulty and the videos prove it". The suffering of this girl goes far beyond the sequelae of her suicide attempt by throwing herself from a fifth floor, but I suppose the media could not grant her a little empathy. In the article, they criticize El País for having said that the girl is paraplegic. They didn't need to look so far: several articles also in OK Diario describe her this way. But citing the enemy is a way of following Vox's argument, which has taken the opportunity to blame Pedro Sánchez for all of this.

A landmark double legal precedent has been set against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), has ordered the tech giant to pay $375 million in damages, finding that the company prioritized profits over safety and concealed what it knew about the potential harmful effects of its apps. According to the state attorney general, who initiated the proceedings, After seven weeks of hearings and just one day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by failing to disclose the potential harms of its apps. Specifically, they pointed to risks of child sexual exploitation and consequences for the psychological development of young children. New Mexico law allows a maximum of $5,000 for violations of this type, so the total is based on the 37,500 violations the jury determined, taking into account the number of minors who could have suffered these consequences. Beyond the amount—relatively small for a corporation that generated $200 billion in revenue last year—this is the first time a state has won against a major technology company for harm to minors. And it opens the door to similar lawsuits across the United States.The verdict comes as Meta faces two other major legal proceedings. The first is in California, where the alleged permissiveness of Meta's platforms in blocking minors from accessing the platform has been judged. For now, the jury has concluded that the big tech He is guilty, but the sentence and any potential compensation have not yet been made public. The case stems from a complaint filed by a 20-year-old woman who suffered from an addiction to the group's social media platforms, which began when she was six years old. The young woman received her first mobile phone at age nine, which has also sparked debate about parental responsibility. According to records, she spent up to sixteen hours a day on the apps. The plaintiff also accused Google, owner of YouTube, which attempted to argue that its video-on-demand service could not be considered a social network.

The assumption is a common illness in the press, consisting of expressing one's own editorial desires based on presumed moods of people far from the medium's creed. When El Mundo headlines "Montero assumes that Andalusia will be a plebiscite for Sánchez" there is no strict news, because what the outgoing minister thinks or doesn't think has very little informative value. These kinds of formulations, in reality, translate as "Things are as I tell them and you shut up, swallow and assume." The sub-headline works in the same direction: "Government examined in the regional elections of May 17th." Again, the Madrid press erases any trace of autonomism in regional elections, which is a considerable merit. I will not deny the influence of the state mood on the Andalusian elections, but I am convinced that if anyone is submitting to a plebiscite, it is precisely the one who has been governing there since 2019, that is, Juanma Moreno, of the PP. Even in his quote of the day that heads the issue, the newspaper resorts to the former prime minister Harold Wilson and his phrase "There is nothing more dangerous for a ruler than to turn an election into a referendum on his own face; he may find that the mirror is broken." We still have no trace of proximity in the gaze.

The saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time, and this Thursday Movistar+ will put it to the test with the premiere of a series that recreates one of the events that gripped the country for almost a month: the kidnapping of player Enrique Castro, alias Quini. It was 1981, and groups like ETA or the Grapo resorted to quick kidnappings as a way to finance themselves. But the footballer's case deviated from this scheme, as the captors were a trio of people with no prior experience in crime, drowning in debt and who did not foresee all the complications – beyond the legal ones – that their action would entail. Por cien millones revisits the case, but from the perspective of these anti-heroes, to whom the creators apply a compassionate gaze.

The main television channels in the world have written a letter to the European Union asking them to regulate big tech companies so that they cannot abuse their dominant position in smart TVs. More and more viewers are consuming their content from the input menu offered by systems powered by Google, Amazon, Apple or Samsung, and this gives them a great ability to highlight some channels – especially their own – over others. An interesting factor is that the complaint is not only supported by European televisions such as RTL, Canal+ or Mediaset, but also by American operators such as Disney, Warner, Paramount or Universal. The EU, in an identity and legitimacy crisis, can capitalize here as a global refuge from the deregulatory wave.