With the uncertainty of what will happen to La 2Cat if the PP and Vox form a government after the elections, the young Catalan-language channel has presented a slightly expansive schedule, which incorporates new voices and adds a few more hours of live broadcasting, up to eight daily. This was explained this Thursday by the channel's heads, in a presentation event that served to unveil the schedule for the coming months. Among the novelties, the programs Cervells mínims, by Toni Clapés, Catalunya fantàstica, by Albert Pla, Tot això eren camps, by Judit Martín, and Nous guerrers, by Erik Harley.

My television colleague Mònica Planas was commenting the other day on the cynicism involved in seeing certain television bigwigs scolding politicians for the tone of public conversation, only to immediately stir up the hornet's nest of tension with a stick once the solemn editorial is finished. They criticize the use of insults and hurtful videos on social media, but they play them with delight and amplify their reach. Reading her, I thought about how a journalistic subgenre also tinged with cynicism is being born, which is going to demonstrations looking for the blow against the poor reporter they have assigned there, in order to then stand up as victims. Nacho Abad made a scene the other day on Cuatro because his camera had been broken. A video from the Bad tongues on La 1 in which various Fascist homos insulted a reporter went viral. Even Iker Jiménez has had the stomach to ask for respect for journalistic work –journalism?– after some protesters confronted a reporter.

Love and sexuality are eternal themes, which have occupied and preoccupied people since the beginning of time, but which can also be analyzed from a contemporary perspective and through current events. It is this intersection that Embolicades aims to explore, a new podcast that ARA is launching this Friday with Beti Badia and Estela Ortiz to talk about sex-affective issues from the present moment, building bridges between culture, thought, current affairs, and personal experience.

The parties try to control the tempos and play them to their advantage, but then the media avalanche decides otherwise. Junts is reflecting on whether it is more convenient to separate Carles Puigdemont’s return from the Spanish elections, but the press has decided it will be one of the elements of the electoral campaign. El País, which years ago had considered him little less than an ogre, now announces with great fanfare the Constitutional Court’s decision to send a double message: to Catalonia, that Sánchez delivers, and to the rest of the State, that de-escalating the independence tension is possible. On the other side of the Rubicon, however, his figure is used to further stir up the hornet's nest. “Puigdemont celebrates his victory and the defeat of the public powers”, they write in La Razón. But, if we look at the original statement by the Junts leader that justifies this headline, we see that a key word is missing. Puigdemont spoke of “the strategy of the Spanish public powers”. It is not the powers that have been defeated, but their strategy, which means their perversion, because they are supposed to function without political parties putting their paws into them. And this includes public powers like the police and the judges, but also private ones like the Ibex-35 or, cough, cough, the media. This idea of the “defeat of the Spanish powers” also appears in the headline of Abc, in this case with a quote that once again skips the key word.

A skyline of New York and, amidst the skyscrapers, a rose rises and a dragon rests on a rooftop. It is the image of a Saint George in the American city that serves as the background for her LinkedIn profile, since she does not have any image on WhatsApp. If the group Los Mismos sang about that physical bridge that would connect the Peninsula with Mallorca, Mary Ann Newman is also the main bridge, in this case metaphorical, that connects Catalan culture with New York.

The front pages the day after the election announcement show that this will be a high-sounding campaign, of communicative maximums. “A high-tension 29-N”, headlines El País, and it would be naive not to realize that the newspaper is also playing the same fear card that the cave has been placing on the table again and again for eight years. Meanwhile, the right-wing bench debates whether to consider Sánchez a corpse or a killer. They don't say it in those words, of course, but the subtext, like cotton, does not deceive. And when El Mundo writes, headlining its front page “Last move to survive”, it is evident that it is selling the bear's skin – in this case the dog's, that is, the dog– and that it offers its readers the dream of seeing the annihilation (metaphorical, for the moment) of its public enemy number one. Continuing with the animal semantic field, Sánchez would be the sea bass out of water that shakes pathetically with some final vain gasps. On the other hand, at La Razón they still do not consider him written off and headline “The Moncloa plan: judicial stoppage and campaign of coups”. According to their vision, and so as not to abandon the bestiary, we must see the PSOE leader as a donkey that pathetically kicks out before the frustration of seeing that they make him go down a path he does not want. It is a front page that delves into the idea of a leader who refuses to succumb to alternation and who, in this resistance, is capable of attacking institutional pillars such as the judicial establishment. About the independence of the judges, of course, better to talk about it another day.

After months of negotiations, this Tuesday Paramount closed the deal to buy Warner Bros. and thus create a great entertainment giant that will be called Skydance. The operation catapults the new company to the forefront of the entertainment and streaming sector, in direct competition with Netflix, Disney and Amazon. "Today is a historic day not only for Skydance, but for the entire industry," David Ellison, owner of the new media group, assured in a statement. To be able to add this succulent asset, the company has disbursed 99 billion euros, since Warner shareholders have been fully compensated in cash.

Surprise! Well, not so much, okay. The early election had been hovering over newsrooms for some time, but it is always interesting to analyze digital front pages, because they offer more immediate and, above all, less meditated reactions than the next day's front pages, where the messages are already much more distilled. From this barrage of raw stimuli, the most prominent –because it is the most dangerous– is the irresponsible dissemination of the idea of future electoral fraud with the results. “Abascal urges not to vote by mail in case they manage to "manipulate the process"”, reports the newspaper Abc on its home page. A political leader has said it and, therefore, it must be explained. But playing along with this uncritical game imposes on the Spanish elections the Trumpian template of (false) electoral fraud that is still an open wound in the country. El País, for example, notes that the President of the Community of Madrid is also playing this card, but explains it critically, with the headline: “Ayuso shakes the ghost of electoral fraud”.

Coinciding with the midpoint of the legislature, La Vanguardia publishes an electoral poll in which the rise of Aliança Catalana and Vox makes Catalonia “ungovernable”, according to the front-page headline. There are only three possible sums, and each one is only viable if the crossed vetoes that have characterized the country's politics in recent years are blown up. There is the pro-independence majority of 72 deputies (AC, ERC, Junts, CUP), or 69 if we exclude the CUP. There is also the right-wing majority (AC, Vox, Junts, PP), which climbs to 75. And, finally, there is what one of the executives at Ipsos, the company that conducted the poll, calls an “orderly tripartite”, which would be the sum of the PSC, ERC, and Junts, reaching 69 seats. It is not difficult to guess which of these scenarios is preferred by the newspaper of order. If these numbers are correct –ultra options usually get better results than the cooked-up projections– the focus will be on Junts, which despite losing more than half of its deputies appears in all three possible cocktails, even if they are combinations more dictated by arithmetic than by palate. In any case, I find it hard to see the party wanting to reach an agreement with Vox and Aliança Catalana, having fewer seats and having to assume, therefore, a subjugated position that could lead it to residualization.

The BBC has deleted an article from its website that, in some way, linked wearing nails without adornments to being a white supremacist. Based on the cultural observation that so-called nail art emerges mainly from Black and Latino communities, the piece ended up suggesting that a clean manicure had become the beauty standard for white racists. It is possible that supremacists do not mostly go around with nails like Rosalía's, but that does not mean – as is otherwise obvious – that any person without multicolored cuticles, impossible porcelains, or embedded diamonds belongs to the Ku Klux Klan. The fact is that media outlets of all kinds, especially those on the right, have critiqued and mocked the article.

The balancing acts of Junts to establish their own profile in Catalonia by positioning themselves as a latent threat to Sanchismo cause the far-right media to perform authentic acrobatics. They criticize them for being separatists and disaffected, but at the same time... oh, what a pleasure, when they see them acting as a nuisance. El País tried to shift pressure with the headline: “Junts rejects the two decrees despite the outcry from the street”. What a contrast, on the other hand, with the front pages of El Mundo (“Junts rejects the two major decrees and leaves Sánchez without options”), Abc (“Junts rejects the two government decrees: «Not like this. They are a mess»”) and La Razón (“Junts rejects the two decrees and Sánchez loses Congress and the street”). It is noticeable that these three newspapers are very sensitive to evictions, specifically that of Pedro Sánchez, and if it can be today, better than tomorrow.

In a few years, the international order has become more unstable and multifaceted. Not only have the poles of power multiplied, but technology has also ceased to be fundamentally a vehicle for innovation and progress to become, in addition, a fundamental actor, crucial for understanding what war or communication is like in the 21st century, if they are even two different things. To map out this new landscape, ARA is organizing a new edition of Enfoquem: the Solutions Forum, aimed at pointing out viable paths for the future based on a firm but calm assessment of current problems and offering readers and subscribers keys to decode the current moment.

The board of the Girona branch of the Journalists' Association has issued a statement expressing its concern over the proliferation of pseudo-media and profiles on social networks that act as “instruments of propaganda and disinformation” and “spread hate speech, promote discrimination, stigmatization, and violate human rights.” It notes that direct attacks on journalists have been carried out from one of these accounts (Girona Perduda), insulting them and questioning their work. The act of identifying some of the anonymous individuals and explaining their links to the far-right party Vox has led to this harassment campaign.

On October 15th of last year, photojournalist Joan Gálvez was shot with a foam bullet while covering a protest in front of the Israeli consulate in Barcelona, despite being identified with a helmet that read the word Press on both sides. The impact was strong enough to send him to the ground, which suggests that the bullet was fired from too close a range. Furthermore, it left a mark on his arm, even though regulations state that one must always aim from the waist down. The inevitable suspicion, with all of this, is that he was aimed at the torso. At the time, almost a year ago, the Mossos said they were opening an internal investigation. Now it has emerged that the case file was closed without even informing the interested parties. In fact, Gálvez was summoned to an Interior Commission at the Parliament where the case was discussed, without being told that a week earlier the Official Bulletin of the Parliament of Catalonia already stated that the investigation was being closed without determining responsibilities for anyone.

He does not put his face on WhatsApp but the sky reflected in the Amazon because he believes that communication always goes beyond the person you have in front of you. “We are inside a whole and this photograph represents it”, says Michel André (Toulouse, 1963), professor of bioacoustics at the UPC and director of the LAB, the only research center dedicated specifically to the study of noise pollution in the ocean. His network of aquatic microphones collects, in real time, the cry for help of marine fauna.

If someone wanted to listen to all the podcasts available in Catalan in one go, they would need five years, two months, fourteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds to get through the 50,791 episodes from 832 different offerings. This is without pausing to sleep, eat, or attend to other physiological needs: just audio straight to the veins. These are data from the first Catalan Podcast Yearbook, published this Wednesday by Espai Sonor with data from the last decade (2016-2025), coinciding with the international day dedicated to this form of audio content. According to the figures, 20 new episodes are uploaded to the web every day, which accounts for the consolidation of this subsector after an expansive decade.

The US Attorney General, Todd Blanche, justified Trump's veto of access for three media outlets to the White House by arguing "that it is a privilege, not a right, to be there." It is a very unfocused statement, unbecoming of a position of his stature. Obviously, being able to enter the facilities of the most powerful government in the world is a privilege, in the sense that the ordinary citizen cannot do so to ask the questions that may trouble them. But the press is not the beneficiary of this privilege: it is merely the vehicle through which the fundamental right to information, which appears in any minimally articulated definition of what a democracy is, is guaranteed. Therefore, the true repository of this right is not CNN, MSNBC or Politico, or any other journalist who irritates Trump with unfavorable coverage: it is the American people as a whole. And, therefore, when he denies access to central media outlets like these, what he is doing is eroding this right to independent information, if you'll pardon the redundancy.

The phrase “The person who most resembles a right-wing Spaniard is a left-wing Spaniard” is attributed to Josep Pla, although the man from Palafrugell never wrote it down. In The Gray Notebook there is, however, a dialogue with his father, who tells him: “The person who most resembles a man of the left, in this country, is a man of the right”. Taking into account the context of the conversation –they are talking about the obstacles the writer's father encountered when cultivating rice in the Empordà– it is risky to introduce the concept of Spain into the middle of it. But a joint article by Crític and El Salto allows us to paraphrase this apocryphal statement to substantiate the fear that the person who most resembles a Spanish far-rightist may be an independence-seeking far-rightist.

On Thursdays, paella. And on Sundays, in Madrid, a demonstration. Until now, the right and the far-right dominated the Sunday rallies, but it turns out that the rally calendar has become so strained that the marching fervor is now spilling over into other days of the week, and on Saturday, two demonstrations of opposing signs coincided, in search of the coveted Sunday cover photo. In this case, the one demanding interventions in housing won by a landslide. The most 'Sanchista' newspapers like El País or La Vanguardia chose it to adorn their front pages, but so did El Mundo. Obviously, this last newspaper was not looking to show solidarity with those who live with the anguish of their lease contract nearing its end, but because it allows them to write a headline such that the protest acts as a boomerang against Sánchez: “The indignation over housing leads to a 15-M attempt: "Either the rentier falls or the government falls"".

After over half a century of a prolific career, the film and series adaptations of Stephen King's books are rapidly approaching one hundred. We have selected the most outstanding ones from each platform for those who wish, taking advantage of the proximity of Halloween, to catch up with the television (and cinematic) adaptations of this benchmark of the horror genre.