On Thursday, La Séptima, also known as Telesánchez, premiered. The network's logo even shares the corporate red that identifies the PSOE. The ideologue behind the television approach is José Miguel Contreras, who was already the creator and founder of La Sexta. He didn't have to rack his brain. La Séptima is as if you were entering a loop of Al rojo vivo from La Sexta that stretches throughout the day, from twelve noon to one in the morning. There are not even news bulletins. It is an eternal talk show. A single set and a single table. The presenters pass the baton to one another. Only the colors of the graphics change so that it seems like a different program, and the pundits. Pundits who, for the vast majority, are the ones we already see on the other networks. Just like in the beginnings of La Sexta, the network has been inspired by the visual approach of Fox. There is an evident gender hierarchy in the distribution of the protagonists. Everything revolves around a male reference figure who leads the television project. Javier Ruiz occupies the prime time and is also the head of programming. The rest of the schedule is shared by a cast of female presenters cut from the same pattern. They all adjust to hegemonic beauty standards; they seem selected not only based on professional criteria but also aesthetic and stylistic ones. An Instagram-inspired mold that makes them almost interchangeable figures. La Séptima projects an extraordinarily limited representation of what a woman should be like in front of the camera. With male faces, there is not the same physical requirement.

If there is a television event where we have traditionally seen the TV3 news teams having a great time, it is the United States election specials, whether it concerns the presidential elections or, as in this case, the midterm elections.

Last Thursday, Eldiario.es published a report revealing that the publishing company of OK Diario, the media outlet directed by Eduardo Inda, paid 242,000 euros to the firm of the lawyer for Koldo García, the trusted man of José Luis Ábalos, former Minister of Transport of Pedro Sánchez's government. He is a central figure in the judicial investigation into possible corruption in public procurement of the so-called Koldo case. It is not only a scandal that a media outlet is the one paying the lawyer's fees, as specified by the invoices. It is also delusional that the entity paying in the case of the alleged corruption scheme linked to the PSOE is precisely the publishing company of a media outlet very critical of that party.

This Sunday the 30 minuts was different. Route 66, listening to the United States was a report by Lídia Heredia in which she crossed the North American country from east to west. If on the news her reports feel short and you have the feeling that the correspondent had much more to offer than what she could fit into three minutes, this time you felt you had enjoyed her journalistic potential. 

In 1941, Herman J. Mankiewicz won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. It has been explained on other occasions how he wrote it: isolated on a ranch in the middle of the Mojave Desert after suffering a serious car accident. Orson Welles, aware of the screenwriter's alcohol addiction, confined him while he was bedridden, and made him write a script that would cause a turning point in their lives and in the history of cinema.

Netflix has released a three-part documentary that aims to be a posthumous portrait of the actor Matthew Perry, known essentially for his role as Chandler Bing in the series Friends. Perry passed away three years ago, after a long history of addiction to alcohol and opioids.

On television, the first hours of a tragedy are usually the most cautious. These are moments when one must strike a balance because the urgency to know inevitably contrasts with the slowness of the rescue and the gathering of data.

This photograph was taken on Monday. It has no artistic pretension, but rather a testimonial one. But after a diplomatic crisis was unleashed between the world of football and the government of China, the label on the water bottle with the smiling face of Mbappé becomes ironic. The footballer's expression acquires an almost comic meaning. For years now, Kylian Mbappé has been a commercial asset in the Chinese market. The player's face is used to sell, among other products, bottled water with isotonic properties. Judging by the bottle labels, it even seems as if the footballer provides aromatic properties. One drink tastes like peach, the other like lemon, and the one featuring the player's photograph is as if it contained the essence of Mbappé. Mbappé water. On the packaging, the footballer laughs, oblivious to the large-scale conflict that has been triggered by a spontaneous comment: the player explained that his favorite meme is one where his face is superimposed on that of Mao Zedong. The footballer referred to him as "a Chinese dictator," which is what he was. He likes it because it exaggerates his authority on the team and among his teammates. In a world of stratospheric egos, becoming a character of absolute power boosts self-esteem.

On Tuesday night, the collaborative left-wing duo formed by Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero visited La revuelta. The La 1 program, in which Broncano harasses his guests by asking about their sexual relations over the last month, encountered two candidates who went beyond his usual calculations and turned sex into the background noise that ran through a good part of the interview.

The people in charge of TV3 must not watch their own television on Sunday mornings. It is a time slot that has remained as a religious stronghold where some content causes astonishment. Every last Sunday of the month they broadcast Néixer de nou, a space from the Evangelical Council that explains what the country's Protestant community does. It has an initial part that is more informative and can be interesting, but, in the end, every week a different pastor appears who addresses the viewer while looking at the camera. After quoting a biblical passage, the pastor gives a sermon. These are some literal fragments of last Sunday's little sermon: “There are situations in our life, perhaps diagnoses of illness, perhaps situations in our house, our marriages, our friendships..., that can make us fall. But what is the promise that the Lord gives us? It is that, as many times as we fall, the Lord will raise us up again”. With an exhortative attitude he continues: “How do we find this strength to get back up? The answer is not in the actions that we take but in what Jesus has done for us. When you find the name of Jesus, when you open your heart to him, he fills you with hope and your base, your foundation, is completely different before knowing him”. And he continues with a messianic tone and raising his index finger: “We depend on the work of Jesus in our heart. What fills your heart? Because if what fills your heart are temporary things, things that pass, things that today you have and tomorrow you don't, when you fall maybe you don't have the strength to get up. But if you let the name of Jesus enter your heart, that his hope be your foundation, it doesn't matter how many times you fall. In the name of Jesus you will be able to get back up and you will be able to declare ‘The Lord has been my help’”. And finally he concludes: “This is my prayer for you, that in the name of Jesus you find the strength to stand tall”.

If it were a man instead of an orangutan, the image could look like the Normandy landing. It has the drama of a war scene. But the Reuters photograph, by Victor Fidelis Sentosa, is from Borneo, in Indonesia. A member of the rescue team and veterinarian Karmele Llano, head of the YIARI foundation, transport an adult female during a rescue operation in an oil palm plantation, in the village of Laman Satong, in the Ketapang region. The rehabilitation center has been taking in dozens of orangutans for months as severe forest fires ravage their natural habitat. The fires, which began in July and are expected to last until November, mainly affect the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, and are the worst the country has suffered in a decade. In 2015, fires in Indonesia already caused a major environmental and health crisis, with pollution that spread to other countries in Southeast Asia.

The Telenotícies vespre on Saturday, with Joan Raventós at the helm in the absence of Raquel Sans, explained the violent disturbances that same day at Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona. When saying goodbye, the presenter addressed the audience who wished to continue staying informed: “Events that we will continue to follow, as it could not be otherwise, from the channel and the 3CatInfo application”.

Pedro Sánchez aspires to an absolute majority and David Broncano wants to vocalize better. These are the two great desires expressed by the protagonists of La revuelta. It is difficult to say which of the two has it more complicated. Sánchez appeared with a Texan look, which is the new corduroy for left-wing politicians. Broncano sarcastically placed a Spanish flag pin on his lapel “so they can see that this is serious”. And in essence, the hour and a half interview had a more serious undertone than it appeared at first glance.

The Puerta del Sol encampment in Madrid has become a very practical stronghold for Spanish television networks to fish for witnesses to confront. The campers have also accepted this game, gaining minutes of glory in front of the cameras and showing themselves off as challengers to presenters and pundits eager for a fight. For the programs, the housing problem does not matter at all, but these are sequences of dialectical aggressiveness that go viral. The decadent spectacle recalls the talk shows of the eighties and nineties in the United States, in which insults, shouting, and humiliation were the main ingredients. The program disguised itself as a debate when in reality it was a core of verbal violence that could end in blows. In the United States, entertainment led to confrontainment and attack shows, based on provocations and fights between guests that served as a draw for the audience. 

Televisión Española is celebrating its seventieth anniversary and on Monday evening the Telediario paid tribute to these seven decades by explaining what is happening in the world. Pepa Bueno's news program put aside current events to look at the past: a magnificent program that, for generations who grew up in front of the television before TV3 existed, became an exercise in memory of faces, voices, names, and images of the world.

On Monday, TV3 premiered In vitro, a series that takes place in a fertility clinic. An innovative idea that, inevitably, forces a balance between comedy and drama. On one hand, the humor typical of work environments and everything related to sex and the intimacy of a couple, and on the other, the suffering that surrounds the difficulties of conceiving a child. Added to this are the human miseries surrounding expectations about offspring and the female universe in complex hormonal situations. A common aspect in many contemporary fictions also emerges: the normalization of an immaturity and infantilization of the characters that enhances the drama of any circumstance, however insubstantial it may be. All in all, a very fertile context for building fiction. In vitro asks, or rather, begs the viewer for a good dose of condescension regarding plausibility. One thing is the reality of reproductive processes and another, very different, is for the characters' actions to be hardly credible: a researcher tricking music students into donating eggs that will satisfy a pianist's longings, or a devoted wife trying to put her husband's semen into a jar, without him noticing, with a furtive straw in his law office. Fried eggs and bananas will become symbolic elements to enhance this zygotic breeding ground. zygotic.

On Sunday, 30 minuts broadcast The schools of the “others”. The quotation marks highlight this critical distance with the classic pejorative euphemism that refers to the immigrant population. A far from innocent detail, but practical for accentuating this idea of otherness with the desire to denounce it.

British actor and presenter Russell Brand steps out of a black Mercedes in front of the Southwark Crown Court in London. His sunglasses, the tie undone over his chest, the way he adjusts his trousers, and his air of superiority are more reminiscent of a celebrity arriving at Paris Fashion Week than a defendant appearing before the justice system. Brand faces seven charges related to sexual offenses, including three allegations of rape. Six women accuse him of acts that allegedly took place between 1999 and 2009. He maintains he is innocent. In the photograph, his bodyguard is carrying the Bible in his hand. A grotesque detail that has to do with the new image this individual is trying to build for himself following the accusations.

This past week, the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, made her debut in the briefing room in an appearance that was a failure. Nervous and overwhelmed, she only took three questions in fourteen minutes.

Last season, in the Sequence diagram of La 2 Cat, Jordi Basté interviewed Salvador Illa just after he returned from his sick leave. This time, the journalist opened the season by visiting Carles Puigdemont in Waterloo just before returning to Catalonia. Without a doubt, he has the gift of timing. “Should I address you as ‘tu’ or ‘vostè’?”, the presenter asked him as soon as he opened the door. He had no choice but to answer “tu”. Answering “vostè” would seem like a symptom of haughtiness. But in journalistic contexts, both with presidents and official positions, the you should be an unquestionable formula. No matter how personal you want the interview to be, what brings the journalist there is the institutional figure. Puigdemont opened the door wearing a tailored suit, tie, stiff-collared shirt, and the lapel pin. And he made it very clear that that attire had become an important symbolic element for him, to maintain the solemnity of the institution he represented, despite being in exile. Even anticipating a possible arrest, that clothing preserved the dignity of his office. No matter how personal or informal the interview was, and even if they were talking in the kitchen, losing the you is one more symptom of how values are distorted: decorum is also a way of recognizing the importance of what is being done. Using the informal 'tú' does not in any case imply a loss of respect, but the formal 'usted' respects that institutional awareness that Puigdemont seemed not to want to lose even on that occasion. Although Basté always prioritizes showing the audience the level of trust with the guest, the use of you should not affect the closeness in the relationship.