As every year for long enough for it to be tradition, ARA invited its community to a meeting to celebrate the end of the course. A newspaper is the collective gaze and adventure of a community, and the Antiga Fàbrica Damm was once again the setting for this gathering of all those who make the newspaper, whether by producing it or reading it. The meeting coincided with one of Albert Om's monthly interviews, with a surprise guest, who turned out to be Ada Parellada, and the conversation was accompanied by happy news: the chef is joining ARA and in September will begin a weekly collaboration with recipe videos.

An opinion piece by Arcadi Espada in El Mundo is being ridiculed by some. It states that “the magnitude of Spanish disappointment in the World Cup requires more than tactical analysis”, that “serious teams do not smile while the anthem plays, but when they collect the cup”, that “the outcome cannot surprise those who observe the moral climate of the country” and that “the elimination leaves urgent lessons for 2030”. It might seem, of course, that the columnist prepared the text days in advance, awaiting the Spanish defeat, and that a lack of filters and misfortune caused it to be published to the great ridicule of the journalist and the media. Some illustrious journalists and people from the profession are taking advantage of this.

I am not a football follower at all, but this World Cup has been a goldmine in terms of communication and a blessing for this section. Some gems from the final that made me happy: “Another of the footballers who drew attention was Dani Olmo, who appeared with a flag of Gibraltar, another of the autonomous communities represented during the celebrations”. It was from Terrassa, but down it goes and Spanish Gibraltar. I was also moved by the article from the editor of Clarín, when she said that the Argentine team had been “well-behaved and respectful” and that “it displayed, on and off the field, a range of values that are not abundant nowadays”. The day they stop being ill-behaved and disrespectful, it would be better to cross the street, then. The Argentine front pages tended to applaud their team, saying they had given their all. I suppose that didn't include the superfluous and trivial detail of shooting at the goal. In any case, the option from El Gráfico was nice, in which Messi was seen crying and the headline “Heroes nonetheless”, because it was a copy of a front page they themselves made in 1990, when the albiceleste lost the final against Germany. Identical headline and composition, only that the one shedding tears then was Maradona. Meanwhile, of course, in the United Kingdom they saw it quite differently and felt little pity for the Argentine defeat: the final report in The Telegraph began with the phrase “Football 1 - Criminals 0”.

Today I propose a game, but you have to reach the end of the article and for some it will be difficult. "Spain comes out of the closet". This is the title of an opinion piece in Abc this Monday, which states that "young Spaniards have thrown overboard the complexes that stifled their elders to show their faith or cheer on their country without caring what others say about them". The gears of banal nationalism begin to turn and La Gran Turra attacks those of us who already like to see half of Barça on the field playing good football, but we cannot forget that Scotland has a national team and Catalonia, no. Some articles along these lines: "When the World Cup is involved, patriotic sentiment seems to transform and Spaniards show their national flag without complexes" (El Confidencial), "Colours displayed without complexes and with pride, as a citizen of Wisconsin might do with those of the United States" (El Mundo), "It has banished for a few weeks the usual shyness of people in displaying the national flag" (Abc), "The day Spain shed its complexes in front of the world" (El Español), "I am Spanish, not a fascist" (Granada Hoy), "A generation of Spaniards without complexes" (Periodista Digital).

Luck has accompanied the Spanish national team to their second World Cup, and none other than RTVE has benefited from this, having spent 55 million to acquire the rights to the competition in open broadcast and being able to milk them until this Sunday's final. Spain's match against Argentina became the second most-watched broadcast in Spain in television history, with an average of 15.7 million viewers and an 87.1% share (behind the penalty shootout in Spain-Portugal of Euro 2012, which had 18.1 million viewers).

Digital journalism has led us to the condemnation of unnecessary news. The algorithm determines that now it's time to talk about Rosalía, and the media rush to produce as many news items as possible on the topic, in the hope that some will be chosen by the opaque recommendation engines. This fever means that, from time to time, news with striking headlines appears. Now that the promotion of La bola negra is starting, it's appropriate to recall that magnificent headline from 20 minutos from some time ago: “What is the origin of the nickname Los Javis?: Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo explain it”. I hope they soon investigate the origins of the cryptic name by which the great musical duo Andy & Lucas are known.

Truth Social, the network driven by Donald Trump, aims to end its enormous losses by creating a kind of premium service that would allow preferential access to the most prominent messages published on it. It's not hard to deduce that no one with two brains – no matter how deep their MAGA cap is on their head – would pay to read the usual bile that's peddled there, if it weren't for the fact that its most followed member is none other than the magnificent Donald Trump. And the second and third are his sons, Don and Eric; it all stays in the family. For now, they haven't given more details, but it's unsettling to think that perhaps the brass emperor intends to monetize preferential access to his policies, since some of the measures that have conditioned the political and social life of the United States, that is, of the world, have been explained in the first instance with a message from him on Truth. Like tariffs. Having these indications with a small margin of time opens the door to generating immediate profits through the exploitation of insider information and is a modern form of corruption, whether to benefit old friends or, above all, one's own pocket.

This September, Sigfrid Gras's term as director of TV3 ends, pending whether the Corporation's governing council renews it for two more years. Taking advantage of the end of the season, we review how this season has gone and the future plans for this public television.

The internet is (virtually) infinite, but the confines of paper are dramatically limited: every square centimeter you dedicate to one topic is a square centimeter you don't dedicate to another. This might seem like a very meager nugget of knowledge, but Cruyff said that if you have the ball, the opponent doesn't, and he certainly got far. This Friday, newspapers had to decide who to grant their square centimeters to: the European guarantee, the amnesty that should bring back (among others) Carles Puigdemont, or the Court pointing Begoña Gómez towards the defendant's bench. As I predicted yesterday, the right-wing headlines relegated the ECJ's ruling to minor sections or, directly as Abc" did, to nothing. And they did so to emphasize that everyone should relax, as the Supreme Court here would use its supremacy – I don't dare to write 'supremacism' – to let the ruling go in one ear and out the other, magnificently unaltered.

It cannot be a coincidence that the two most Sanchez-aligned newspapers, The Country and La Vanguardia, following those that on Thursday already carried the verdict of the CJEU on their front pages, endorsing the amnesty. In the case of Prisa's newspaper, it presented it as an intuition of the sovereignists, with a cautious headline: “Independence supporters trust in European endorsement of amnesty”. If it didn't happen, it was the independence supporters who trusted in vain. But the case of Godó's newspaper is more interesting: “The Supreme Court will wait for the Constitutional Court to apply the amnesty”. Here, not only was the European go-ahead taken for granted, but it went a step further to indicate what the reaction of the TS will be, which will basically consist of pretending to hear the rain. In the end, the Supreme Court is not mentioned by caprice, but because when they catch someone, it is not to let them go without putting them through their mincer. They will wait for the Constitutional Court, they will throw the ball back to Europe, they will ask if this or that, because as long as they flee the scene, they are winning and keeping the exiles away from home. A supreme lesson, one might say, from the dish they are cooking slowly but relentlessly for the diner Puigdemont. In any case, the fact that such spoilers can be made so many moves in advance should already be considered a bad sign: it indicates the extent to which the State is institutionally broken and a group of judges dictate its (political) designs outside of, ahem, Congress.

It is well known that Sánchez (Pedro) likes everything, and chance – and the boots of Oyarzabal and Porro – have favored that on the day the print press has to report on his brother's conviction, the front pages give generous space to the victory of the Spanish national team. A first observation, looking at the headlines, is that the vast majority have "Sánchez's brother" as the subject. El Mundo goes a bit further and is offensive, titling "Sánchez's plugged-in brother." Only Abc headlines without the relationship: "David Sánchez, convicted of malfeasance." It seems like an innocent headline, but it has intent and cunning. It's about selling the idea that justice has operated normally and therefore the name of the person caught in the wrong is stated plainly. This false asepsis hides the fallacy: from the moment it has not been proven that Sánchez (David) obtained his position through machinations by Sánchez (Pedro), all this fuss over a case that everyone knows a good handful of, if they've barely left home, is unusual. The judges let the word nepotism slip in an ornamental place in the sentence for the friendly press to pick up, but in their reasoning, they admit they couldn't prove influence peddling.

If part of an columnist's strength is their ability to generate debate around their thinking, it must be recognized that Mariano Rajoy is a titan of influence. Days after his column stating that the French team did not have French people, he manages to get El País to dedicate the cover headline to him: “Storm against Rajoy in Spain and France for his «racist» article”. It is a pity that the newspaper has taken refuge in cowardly quotation marks, because the article was racist and there should be no need to resort to the subjective opinion of a source to say that if it walks like a duck, has feathers, and goes quack, it is indeed a duck. 

The merger between two entertainment giants has encountered the most serious attempt to legally abort this agreement. A coalition of twelve states under Democratic Party rule, including strategic states like California, New York, and Washington, has filed a joint lawsuit demanding that the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount be judicially vetoed, as they believe the film distribution market will become uncompetitive, leading to potentially irreparable losses for cinema owners. The plaintiffs also believe that the deal, valued at 111 billion dollars, will affect competition in cable channels, including CNN.

Ernesto Castro is a young philosopher who achieved some success as an youtuber discussing contemporary cultural issues. Recently, he went viral for explaining his conversion to Catholicism, and various newspapers have interviewed him. El País did so via questionnaire, at his express request, and the result is a piece where the problem of not having the subject in front of you becomes evident: Castro took the opportunity to troll the newspaper with every few answers. "You journalists will know why these fifteen minutes of shit and mud that the internet has reserved for all of us alive in this century are now being thrown at me," he snapped. Or: "If the press says so, it must be true, right? Thank goodness for rigorous newspapers! What would our lives be like without fact checking?" And when asked how his parents had taken it, he replied: "Excuse me, but is this interview for El País or for ¡Hola!?" The journalist also asked how his 170,000 subscribers had received this conversion, and he said sarcastically: "I don't know, I don't know them all. We'll have to ask them one by one. A new challenge for investigative journalism this millennium." Days earlier, in El Mundo, he dismissed it in a similar way. "It's clear that in the art of interviewing, competition isn't very fierce," he let slip to the journalist.

A few weeks ago we were celebrating the return of Mariano Rajoy to the genre of opinion journalism with his columns full of teachings usually forbidden to laypeople, as when he wrote: “In football, what really matters is to score more goals than the opponent. If you don't, you lose. Or, in the best of cases, you draw.” The fact is that, even after having acted as a modern Prometheus and bringing us fire with these revelations, he has persisted in his illuminating task and, speaking of the French team that the Spanish national team has to face, he said that it had “a squad of the highest level; however, without Frenchmen.” The diplomatic incident was instantaneous and several Welsh authorities had to remind Don Mariano that not only are all the players on the team French, because this condition is fortunately not determined by a specific skin tone, but that of the 26 players called up, 23 were born on French territory. And the other three, even if they were born abroad, are also French, because, as the leader of the French socialists reminded him, French nationality has to do with adherence to the project of the Republic.

You give AI an inch and it takes your arm up to your armpit or floating ribs. A study by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute highlighted the dangers of asking generalist artificial intelligences to improve your text. "Jesus did not die: he was not real!" was the instruction from which the tool had to generate an improved draft proposal. Google's application changed it to "The story of Jesus continues to inspire and challenge us today. Whether you believe in his divinity or not, his impact on history is undeniable." Qwen, an AI from the giant Alibaba, calmly changed it to "Jesus did not die, and he was real." Researchers have found that the changes go towards both progressive and conservative positions, especially depending on the service you use. Grok, for example, boasts of going against the current, and this means that even if you ask it to preserve the original meaning of your text, you risk it slipping in its ideology, which leans heavily to the right. This case is very crude, but the study's authors explain that even small subtle details can be amplified through different interactions, and that the multiplier effect of these AIs, used by millions of people, can end up causing changes in public opinion on the most sensitive issues, more prominent than the biases already inherent in these tools.

The television season has ended and has left a few tremors on the board: the shift at Televisió Espanyola, the arrival of La 2Cat, the decline of Telecinco and the rise of Cuatro are just some of the phenomena that have shaken the audience landscape, both in Catalonia and in Spain.

Now that the SER talk shows are being discussed following Àngels Barceló's departure, it is appropriate to do a bit of archaeology and explain that the Prisa business group, in fact, banned them for a great many years. This is explained, with his usual wit and rigor, by journalist Antonio Villarreal, an atypical character who has just published the book Tertulianos, un viaje a la industria de la opinión en España. This book explains the history of this typically Spanish genre, which was not born, as is often believed, with La clave, which was more philosophical and rambling, but with the fleeting program La trastienda, on SER, in which current events were chewed over with that mix of biased information, opinion, and verbal acidity. I say fleeting because on June 1, 1984, one of the panelists, José Luis Gutiérrez, said that Alfonso Guerra's secretary had a lover in Rome who enjoyed a series of special privileges. But it turns out that the young woman was not close to the secretary, as was later known, but to the Spanish vice president, and had even had a daughter with him outside of marriage. Someone airing – even if it was by placing it on the shoulders of the poor secretary – that scandal over the airwaves pushed him to demand Gutiérrez's head on a silver platter, which was served to him. The program continued for a while, but diluted until it was easy to get rid of it.

When talking about Catalan public media, it's easy to think of TV3, Catalunya Ràdio, and the other brands of the Corporation. But there is also the Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN) which, since its founding in 1999, has undergone various ups and downs in its ownership model and, above all, its governance. The Government is willing to open a process to grant it more independence and is preparing a draft bill that it intends to bring to Parliament around November. If it goes ahead, and in principle there is political consensus for it to do so, the ACN would move forward in its de-governmentalization and would also have a program contract that would allow it to work with greater budgetary stability.

The rise of neo-fascism is leading to the uninhibited expression of racism, hidden under the pretext of a very misunderstood cultural purity. A recent example is the boycott campaign against the adaptation of theOdyssey that Christopher Nolan will soon release, because Helen of Troy will be played by Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actress. That someone racialized interprets someone who has gone down in history as an icon of classical beauty makes them very nervous. They are the same ones who three years ago protested against Halle Bailey for ruining The Little Mermaid assuming the role of Ariel being black. Among those who have now joined are Twitter's boss, Elon Musk, who sees the dangerous shadow of rampant wokism and thus informs his 240 million followers. It's funny they attacked Nolan, who in The dark knight rises he filmed a deeply unsettling – to put it mildly – Batman in which the hero restored order and thestatus quo at a stroke when a popular revolt that could be seen as a caricature of Occupy Wall Street intended to drag the rich to court. Media outlets like Salon or Film International directly called the film fascist, even admitting it was a magnificent film. That the simple skin color of one of the actresses already condemns Nolan's new film in the eyes of the MAGA world evidences the asymmetry of the extremes: at least with that Batman there was an analysis of the content, while now they have already hanged the director even without having seen the film.