No matter how much Manolo Lama and Paco González shouted themselves hoarse at the Bernabéu, Real Madrid's stadium was the scene of another defeat, in this case without footballers on the pitch: the Barcelona ceremony marked an abysmal contrast. Sobriety and good taste gave a helping hand to the saccharine cayetanismo. Complacency is nauseating, but the autoestima boost was necessary. In any case, a great contrast between the Barcelona and Madrid headlines this Thursday. The cave insisted on its obsession: Spain, Spain, Spain. "Blessed Sagrada Família, a sign of 'concord in Spain'," wrote El Mundo. It would have been nice to refer to the concord shown by the police on September 11, 1924, when they arrested Gaudí for refusing to speak Castilian. Abc also highlighted the temple's power to maintain state cohesion and La Razón, for its part, spoke of "unity," which we all know that under its masthead – that rojigualda in the corner of the flag – means, also and always, Spain. All in all, one way or another of not addressing the evidence: there are two different cultures, which are also expressed in aesthetics and the externalization of religious sentiment.

The Church has a long tradition in the business of issuing messages ambiguous enough to be interpreted at the convenience of the times (and of the other powers with which it has to triangulate). The Pope urged Catalans to be “builders of unity” and, of course, the cave has not taken long to put it on the front page. Because, in their mental framework, the word unidad is just the tip of the iceberg of the phrase unidad de la España entera. And, thus, when Abc or El Mundo print this papal exhortation in favor of unity on their respective front pages, they do so to convey that the pontiff is demanding that the independence joke cease once and for all. On the other hand, let's compare it with this subtitle from La Vanguardia: “Leo XIV asks «people from Barcelona and Catalans» to become «builders of unity», beyond polarization”. Adding that the plea is also for the people of Barcelona is important, because it deactivates the strictly national reading of the matter. And the reference to polarization reinforces the idea that we are not talking about the territorial integration of Catalonia with Spain, but about another issue that, incidentally, points out these enthusiastic headlines quite a bit, as a source and generator of eternal friction.

If this is the Big Ben, we are in London. If this is the Eiffel Tower, we are in Paris. And, if this is the Sagrada Familia, we are in Barcelona. There are buildings with the capacity to represent an entire city just by appearing in a photograph, and the temple designed by Antoni Gaudí occupies a prominent position in this Instagram Olympus. L’ARA has spoken with photographers who have photographed the Sagrada Familia to explain what to do (and what not to do) when capturing this icon in a souvenir snapshot.

Political (or spiritual, as the case may be) leaders, when preparing a public address, are clear about the key idea they would like to see replicated and amplified through the leverage of the media. If they have communication advisors, they try to place a specific headline in as many places as possible. But polarization has caused Pope Leo XIV to stumble upon the multiplication of loaves, fishes, and interpretations of his words. El País highlights that he urges bishops to fight against "the plague" of pedophilia, but El Mundo underscores his request to politicians for "moral limits to power," meaning that Pedro Sánchez should call elections once and for all. Abc focuses on "the defense of life" (i.e., against women's right to abortion) and La Vanguardia dwells on "fleeing from permanent political disqualification," because this way there's no way to negotiate peacefully with whoever is in charge, man. El Periódico focuses on "human dignity" and ARA on the criticism of the "national priority" of PP and Vox. In other words, among the newspapers from Barcelona and Madrid that highlight an element of his speech –La Razón and El Punt Avui have headlines without specific accents – there are no two ideas that are repeated: so many heads, so many miters. Communication dispersion is usually a symptom of a missed shot, but here it could also be a symptom of great intelligence: give a little feed to everyone and, look, day by day, the pope pushes forward.

The crisis in the media is creating information deserts at the local level, making it fertile ground for disinformation. A British study based on an analysis of 125,000 messages reveals that the 4.4 million citizens in these journalistic wastelands are three times more likely to end up spreading misleading messages originating from groups operating on social networks at a local level. According to this research, 1 in 26 Facebook messages related to news contain disinformation, and two out of five groups contained at least one piece of misleading information (and often several more) when analyzing the last 1,000 messages on any given topic. On X, the ratio of manipulated or false content exceeds 25%. The co-author of the study stated that “local disinformation is the silent killer of trust in the United Kingdom”.

The de-synodalizer who de-synodalizes him will be a good Jiménez Losantos. The good people at Libertad Digital are climbing the walls with this pope, who seeks to alter the pyramidal structure of the Church, in favor of a new polygon where the base has more importance. This "progressive drift" pushes them to publish headlines more cryptic than the mystery of the Holy Trinity: "PS (PSOE, Sánchez) hopes that a synodalized pope and a rigged World Cup will give him a judicial respite". Well, at least a few decades ago the conspiracies were Judeo-Masonic and now they are only Catholic-footballistic: we have evolved a little. The media had to resort to these ultramontane analyses because reporting the words of Leo, who has criticized the culture of polarization, would have left them in evidence. The rock of Peter on which the Church is built is imperfect, but the rock of flint on which Losantos has built his congregation deserves many adjectives, but today we will only say that it is un-Christian.

Although the britpop war with Oasis has condemned Damon Albarn to always be the-singer-of-Blur in the collective imagination, the fact is that his parallel project, Gorillaz, has much more following, or at least that's what the 40.8 million monthly followers on Spotify suggest, compared to Blur's 14.4 million. The main stage of this Saturday's Primavera Sound made it clear that this experiment of creating a musical collective with a reduced ego and that visually expresses itself through Jamie Hewlett's drawings has been a complete success: the esplanade known as Mordor overflowed with an audience that wanted to join Albarn's particular proposal.

Primavera Sound 2026 began on Thursday with rain as an unwanted guest. And it ended on Saturday with a very different guest: American singer Olivia Rodrigo. One of the festival directors, Gabi Ruiz, had announced on Thursday on RAC1 that there would be a top-level artist whose surname began with the letter R. "A Halland," he said, citing the Norwegian Manchester City player. Finally, the name of the artist in question, the hidden card, was announced on Saturday at half past six in the afternoon, when rumors were already circulating because the artist herself had shared a photograph in which she appeared as a vip spectator of Friday's show by The Cure at Primavera Sound.

The correspondent in the United States for the newspaper Abc, David Alandete, sued Minister Óscar Puente for an exchange of messages on social networks that, in his opinion, damaged his honor. The ruling has been issued and does not favor him: it considers that the expressions used by the head of Transport are not "insulting, outrageous or vexatious", even though they may be seen as "sarcastic and, indeed, harsh criticisms". It is good to have a clear line that defines the perimeter separating one thing from another, and it is evident that there is no need to resort to insults to be able to express oneself with forcefulness and malice. But the paragraph that I find most revealing is another. In the note provided by the Supreme Court, Alandete is reminded that "he did not limit himself to the ordinary exercise of his informative activity, but voluntarily assumed a particularly visible and active position within a political controversy of evident general interest, personally contributing to the public debate generated". In other words – once you remove the profusion of adverbs ending in "ment" and unnecessary gerunds typical of abstruse judicial prose – the journalist is told that if he doesn't want trouble, he shouldn't go looking for it.

The Cure's return to the stage, after a year and a half break, showed them in a very different incarnation from their previous visit to the Palau Sant Jordi, in November 2022. At that time they were presenting the album Songs of a lost world, marked by the death of the parents and a brother of the band's leader, Robert Smith. The group has also lost guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who died in December. Despite this accumulation of loss, The Cure, who triumphantly took the main stage at Primavera Sound as headliners this Friday, left all that grief behind to offer their most festive and festival-ready repertoire, with a very generous selection of singles, out of the fifty they have released in almost half a century of existence.

The New York Times has made a striking deployment: it has dedicated itself to analyzing the 602 times Elon Musk has made one of his fabulous promises and has set a date for them. It turns out that only in 19% of cases has he met the announced deadlines. This does not mean that the rest are failures, because there are projections for years to come, but the report sheds light on an interesting pattern: that of the promising technological carrot that is dangled in front of people's noses. And what we should ask ourselves is why he makes this profusion of projections that no one demands of him. The answer is that all the wealth of the richest man in the world is not based on assets that have a concrete value, but rather, in reality, when his fortune is calculated – and publicized – what is done is a calculation of the value of his companies. And this value is never an analysis of present-day assets, but fundamentally estimates of the future. Now that he is preparing for the IPO of SpaceX, the 1.8 trillion dollars he aspires to be valued at are, fundamentally, expectations.

From time to time, rain claims a spot as a headliner at Primavera Sound. It happened a couple of years ago during PJ Harvey's memorable concert and it happened again this Thursday evening, when the Fòrum venue was already full of a crowd ready to spread out among the different stages. The combination of rain and wind, with gusts of up to 80 km/h, conditioned the first day, and "for safety reasons" performances on the two main stages on the marine platform (where four concerts were cancelled) were temporarily suspended, and later on other stages. It was the decision taken diligently by the festival's management, and communicated in Catalan, Spanish, and English throughout the venue. The festival will announce on Monday the protocol for the return of Thursday tickets.

Netflix has reached an agreement with Televisió Espanyola for the programs of La revuelta to be incorporated the next day into its catalog. These are episodes that can be found on the (very well designed) RTVE Play app, and for free, but the streaming giant knows that becoming Broncano's second window for young people who no longer consider traditional channels can be very beneficial for it. The public entity, for its part, obtains income that reduces the cost of the program, and the presenter also benefits doubly: he gains a new broadcast channel that can give him more visibility and, at the same time, he takes a small step onto the platform, knowing that if Vox and PP come to power, the first thing they will do is evict half of RTVE, himself first.

The concert that opens Primavera Sound is usually a nod from the festival to a local artist. If last year it was Llum who broke the ice, this year it was Ouineta who was in charge of sounding the first notes of Wednesday's session, also free as a gesture to the city. The singer, dancer, and choreographer defended her danceable pop with urban touches in front of an audience of fans – mostly female – who sang the songs by heart, which suggests that this first performance is not so much a vehicle to make herself known to the international audience as a way to celebrate that the Catalan scene, even if at the ungodly hour of mid-afternoon, exists. The highlight of her performance was when Mushkaa appeared to sing Nois" together. 

The case against Pedro Sánchez's brother is one of those issues that has quickly led to a clash of parallel narratives in which, depending on who you read, David Sánchez seems to be a firm candidate for beatification or deserving of a spell in the cauldrons of Pere Botero. Let's look, for example, at this headline from El Mundo: “Key witness cornered the competition that the brother won”. Ah, the old superlative of suggested guilt! But, in this auction of evidence, La Razón raises the stakes and doubles the number of people condemning (the other) Sánchez: “Two witnesses support the evidence against David Sánchez about his workplace in Badajoz”. Who offers more? Did I hear three witnesses in the back row? No, but El Periódico proposes someone else to nail the brother to the cross: “The aspirant to David Sánchez's position says that ‘it was known who it was for’”. No one would bet much on the innocence of the accused, reading all these people who are tearing his story to shreds. But here comes El País who sees it very differently and, on its front page, tries to counter the adverse narratives with: “Civil servants defend that Sánchez obtained the position in a clean process”. 

In just over four years, artificial intelligence has managed to occupy a central place in our lives, but its current model threatens not only the sustainability of the media but also the foundations of democracy. This was argued on Monday night by A.G. Sulzberger, editor of the New York Times, during his intervention within the framework of the major annual meeting of Wan-Ifra, the main global press sector, which is being held this year in Marseille.

He didn't write for ’ARA, but readers saw him a lot in this newspaper: followers of Miquel Ferreres' cartoons often found him drawn in the jokes, accompanied by his colleague Josep Pernau, observing human and social miseries with elegant perplexity. Pernau died in 2011 and now Josep Maria Cadena leaves the Catalan press orphaned of a benchmark, whether as an active journalist, as a promoter of media and institutions in the field, as an art critic, and as a tenacious scholar of the country's publications, especially if they were satirical. His monographs on Catalan cartoonists –Opisso, Junceda, Apa, Perich...– are essential canonical works for approaching these authors.

So many times criticizing polls when they ask leading questions, and now I've been able to experience it firsthand. A short while ago, I was called to participate in a survey and I agreed. After the initial generic questions, it quickly became evident what they were looking for. They asked me, for example, if jokes about vulnerable groups should be allowed. I asked if I could say yes, but depending on who made it, with what intention, and in what context. They didn't let me, of course: either yes or no. And I refused to answer a question that seemed completely manipulative to me. Because a gas station cassette tape from Arévalo laughing at homosexuals is not the same as a joke that is only seemingly racist because it actually seeks to plant the audience's own prejudices in their faces. But whoever designed it was looking for a specific answer, and it was impossible to fit these nuances into an Excel sheet of yes or no. The person who was administering it to me was kind and patient, but – as is understandable – all my digressions valuing the questions received a resigned "aha" as a response, before moving on to the next question.

Nearly 50,000 people approached the Olympic Ring of Montjuïc this weekend to attend 3Cat en Viu, the event with which the Catalan Corporation of Audiovisual Media seeks to recover the spirit of Festa dels Súpers but expanding the perimeter to adult spectators, listeners, and users as well. These are figures that fall far short of its predecessor, which disappeared in 2017, when it registered 190,000 visitors – and which had been declining, compared to 2011, when it set a record with 420,000 attendees–.