The right-wing newspapers took advantage of their Sunday editions to interview different profiles from the PP, to see if they can finish shoring up the majority of 200 deputies they aspire to. Xavier García Albiol did a double act in La Razón and Abc, while Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo starred on the front page of El Mundo, the newspaper that fawns over her the most. A few days ago, these same papers were talking about the two souls of the PP, the moderate one and the hard one. It is clear which one is being brandished in the media and which one occupies the subjugated and cosmetic positions. Mind you, at least the Popular Party members had done their homework and read the talking points. Let's compare Albiol's headline (“It is in Sánchez's interest to inflate Vox to weaken the PP”) and Toledo's (“Sánchez wants division, for Vox to rise so that the PP loses”). Forget Laplace's game of seven differences.

How do we fight against fake news? “With media literacy!”, the choir responds, in unison, with the smug satisfaction of knowing the answer. But, beyond chanting this self-complacent clamor, what are we actually doing to increase it in our democracies? I understand that this is the underlying concern that has motivated the manifesto of the Platform for Media Education, which demands that the government translate good words into concrete measures. Indeed, since it is a cross-cutting issue that in no way only affects the Department of Education, there is a danger that –by passing the buck– no relevant policies will be implemented to help improve people's resources when it comes to navigating informative waters with many more currents, whirlpools, breakwaters, and siren songs than ever before. And we know that the rough seas are here to stay.

In politics, dancing to someone else's tune usually leads to problems and twisted ankles. The PP has long been trying to stop the hemorrhage of votes towards Vox and, in its graceless and uncoordinated gesticulation to follow this frantic cha-cha-cha, it only widens the dance floor for Abascal and his followers to puff out their chests, Saturday Night Live style. The press plays a role in all of this, of course. And so, we find that this Friday El País took advantage of the signing of Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo to write: “Feijóo reinforces the lists with profiles from the hard wing and regional positions”. On the other hand, in El Mundo the front page was very different and the headline was “Feijóo combines with Álvarez de Toledo and Sémper the two souls of the PP on the lists”. The contrast of keywords is evident: hard and souls. The whitewashing of the most extreme positions and the politics of resentment also happens through a semantic sterilization of the concepts.

Press photographers have the power to stop time and freeze action in the most eloquent hundredth of a second. An image of Javier Milei and Isabel Díaz Ayuso about to merge into a hug is making waves this Thursday on the front pages. It is a grotesque scene: the profusion of arms in disharmonious directions and the erratic torsos (oh, the Madrid president and her verticality) make them look like two puppet characters in a hysterical children's play: the only thing missing is for the puppets to shout "If you see the perro, shout very loudly, children!" Perhaps that is why La Razón opts for a more discreet image, where a serene and balanced handshake can be seen. Newspapers most sympathetic to Sanchismo, such as El País or La Vanguardia, take advantage of this strident photograph and try to neutralize the meeting by reminding readers in the front-page texts that Alberto Núñez Feijóo avoided sharing the frame with the anarcho-ultra-liberal-carajista, who on this occasion did not bring his chainsaw. They also explain that Abascal preferred to do a Zoom, which is like the poor man's handshake when you don't want to go to the trouble of actually meeting someone. Once again, we see how this campaign is being articulated around rage baiting or the clickbaiting of anger: the photo of Sánchez and Begoña larger in the right-wing newspapers, to inflame their readers, and that of Ayuso and Milei in those of the other trench, to achieve a symmetrical effect.

Two Catalan boys, Ahmed and Youssef, have been through an ordeal because someone took their photographs and claimed they were the murderers of an 83-year-old woman in Burgos. Far-right profiles massively spread their respective images to fuel racist discourse and, as always happens, corrections travel slower than rumors, which roll and roll and go much further. I want to focus, in any case, on the media outlet El Imperial, which was one of those that amplified this lie. The name, of course, says it all. “The identity of two boys completely unrelated to the case was published by mistake. The incompetent person who published the news has already been expelled from the media outlet”.

To me, the fact that the Bernabéu starts singing “Polaco the one who doesn't vote” affects me between zero and nothing. People go to the stadium to vent their base passions and act like cavemen: it is normal for them to utter environmental slogans, among which Catalanophobia always occupies a place of honor. Getting angry at the Real Madrid crowd is missing the mark because one must point at the sprinklers of this hatred. An example: the clip that has gone viral from a Movistar+ program in which they commented with sarcasm on how the Real Madrid delegate explained to Mbappé what this meant by polaco. The commentators of the video found it hilarious and, therefore, the viewer received the message that this belittlement was valid. Media professionals who would quite rightly censor the intolerable racist insults against black players when they are called monkeys normalize in a mass medium that the derogatory polaco –which made its fortune in the barracks during the Franco regime– is something to laugh about. If they did it without realizing it, they should apologize and go to the corner to think and reflect on the social responsibility of those of us who have a loudspeaker at hand.

Andrea Gumes is expecting a baby. She hosted the daily magazine Tardeo on Ràdio Primavera Sound for four seasons. She has partnered or currently partners with Anna Pacheco on the podcast Ciberlocutorio. And with Andreu Juanola on La cullerada. And with Berta Gómez on Demasiadas mujeres. She has hosted the program Nervi on TV3. She co-hosted and co-directed La turra, before Alba Riera did it solo. She has published articles in Rockdelux about series. And she talks about books on Tot es mou with Helena Garcia Melero. I won't go on any further about her resume, but I assume the list is enough to understand why she would be upset by the following headline, published in El Nacional: “Clara Molins, indie singer and new TV3 presenter, replaces a pregnant woman”. Reducing her to her condition as a pregnant person, to the point where you don't even mention her by name, means belittling her and exudes a disturbing sexism.

The only thing missing was Ángela Carrasco blaring through the speakers with those shrieks that said “si tu eres mi hooombreee y yo tu mujeeeer, donde quieras que estés amooor, contigo estarééé”. Pedro Sánchez’s kiss to Begoña Gómez is one of the campaign’s images, and most newspapers included it on their front page. The scene, being prefabricated, had a touch of discomfort and, in the wide shots showing the crowd applauding that display of intimate affection, also a dose of political pornography. Perhaps that is why the headline in El País (“Sánchez puts Begoña into the campaign”) expressed a certain discomfort and was identical to that of El Mundo.

We usually consider resignations an honorable (and rare) gesture but they are often more cosmetic than decisive. In the case of the socialists' spokesperson, it is obvious that it is an aesthetic issue: it looks bad for someone to come out making grand proclamations in favor of tenants while their partner is actively pursuing evictions in the courts and speculating in the real estate casino, where the bank also always wins. Now, I would bet a pea, or a penthouse in Madrid if I had one, that she must not be the only politician caught in this contradiction. The thing is not to get caught. From there, the day's press made it evident that the situation was a lose-lose for Sánchez. And the right-wing newspapers fell into amusing contradictions. For example, El Mundo headlined: “Hypocrisy over housing wipes out the PSOE spokesperson” and said in a subtitle that “Sánchez asked her to stay because she was 'a great asset' to the party”. According to this thesis, it is Montse Mínguez who decides to quit, knowing that she has become a burden. And the newspaper, of course, tried to attach this dead weight to the leader of the PSOE, to see if there is any luck and he sinks with her in the process. On the other hand, the ABCexecuted a different (and incompatible) strategy. On the front page they wrote: “Sánchez sacrifices the PSOE spokesperson to cover up the housing fiasco”. Here they did not buy that the Spanish president wanted to retain her and they portrayed him with the executioner's axe, merciless, capable of decapitating one of his own to survive another day and divert the focus from the umpteenth scandal.

Katie Zacharia has been Trump's latest hire as press secretary and her debut in front of the journalists could not have been more disastrous, to the point that he has already fired her. Clinging to a piece of paper without which she seemed incapable of articulating a minimally coherent speech, she even suffered while reading because she stumbled and it was obvious she did not know where to place the emphasis in the sentences. Furthermore, her profile was under scrutiny because she had been presented as a lawyer and it is unclear if, beyond graduating from Pepperdine University, she passed the subsequent mandatory exam to be able to practice. In English, they distinguish between attorney and lawyer, and after multiple inquiries from the media, it was not clear if she is one or the other. But everything suggests that more than a lawyer she is a liar, that is to say, a blatant liar, which, considering who hired her, is not exactly a surprise.

THE MINIMUM VITAL INCOME generates irritation among the most liberal newspapers, and arbitrary comparisons are one of the most useful resources for spreading their layer of demagoguery. Let's look at the front page module of La Razón. The headline says: “The government has spent 22 billion on the Minimum Income, equivalent to 35 hospitals”. What does one thing have to do with the other? They could have said it is the equivalent of 215 Eurofighter Typhoons, or that the Ministry of Defense spends 50% more in one year than what it has cost to ensure since 2020 that the most vulnerable people have their basic survival guaranteed. It would have been equally demagogic, but precisely when you identify these types of arbitrariness you can very well gauge where each media outlet stands. In addition, the newspaper cheats a little, because it adds the expenditure of six years, which always helps to make the ball bigger to swallow and digest. I suppose there is a department at the newspaper in charge of reviewing all of Sánchez's measures and explaining them only from the worst possible angle and full of dirt and slime.

I admit that, for a moment, seeing the coincidence on the Spanish front pages made me think that not everything was lost and that polarization had not ruined everything (yet). That in the middle of an election campaign it was impossible to distinguish whether a front-page headline belonged to an apologist for Sanchismo or one of its unredeemed and furious critics made one think of the miracle of reconciliation. The thawing of the two Spains! Let's look at these two covers, to see if one can guess which is from El País and which is from El Mundo: “The King, to the people of Ceuta: 'We will not leave you alone or defenseless'” and “'Our obligation is to defend an inalienable part of Spain'”. The same would happen if we added Abc and La Razón. In all of them, the floor is given to Felipe VI, without any semantic twist that allows one to deduce a criticism of Sanchismo.

One of the disputes on the playing field of these elections is whether to allow the vote of those children and grandchildren of people who lost their Spanish nationality due to exile. The Supreme Court –who else?– has struck a blow to the PSOE's aspirations to allow tens of thousands of people abroad to vote, understanding that it is a type of electorate that favors them for obvious reasons. It could be said, however, that the high court has left this pretension tied... and well tied. The right-wing newspapers celebrate it with headlines such as “The Supreme Court dismantles the external census designed by the government” (La Razón) although others like El Mundo still see options for the wily Sánchez: “The government clings to Pumpido to save "the vote of the grandchildren"”. In this case, the spiciest headline is, understandably, that of El País, with “The Supreme Court suspends the right to vote of 163,000 Spaniards”. Expressed this way, without any reference to the controversial law, it is a formulation that conveys to the reader an electoral fraud: if they are Spanish, how is it that they are not allowed to vote? On the other hand, it is precisely this fast track of distributing nationalities that is seen as an attempt to adulterate the elections.

Headline in El Mundo: “The photo of the boss Isabel Díaz Ayuso that everyone is talking about”. In the text, there are cringe-worthy phrases –and blatant sexism– such as “Nobody can deny that Ayuso looks beautiful and, perhaps because of that, the photo has spread like wildfire”. But the photo didn’t spread (only) because of that. Several users have accused the Popular Party, who were the ones sending the image with the boss message, of using artificial intelligence to increase the volume of the Madrid president’s breasts and to make her nipples more visible behind her tight blouse. Certainly, in some frames of her speech before the Madrid Assembly that day, her bust seems less voluminous, but, without being an expert, everyone knows that the chest has the curious ability to become more or less prominent depending on the posture, the movement, the angle, or the air inserted into the lungs.

Right-wing newspapers have been repeating a mantra for months, with pieces marking a milestone to be achieved. It is necessary to obtain three-fifths of the seats in Congress between the PP and VOX, they say, to build a majority broad enough to allow for the renewal of bodies such as the Constitutional Court or the board of directors of RTVE without having to reach an agreement with the PSOE. These are unashamed slogans, which involve openly acknowledging the will to impose their policies with a steamroller. Behind these reinforced majorities provided for by law lies the healthy idea of forcing consensus to avoid sectarianism. Maximum cynicism, then, from the media that are now setting this goal for themselves, when they have spent years talking about the fallacy of independent judges and passing off any legitimate criticism as anti-democratic attacks. It becomes obvious that they did not want to defend the separation of powers. The only thing they wanted, quite simply, was to be able to occupy all the levers of power, from the first robe to the last armchair. Editorials that scolded the Constitutional Court for having a (let's call it) progressive majority will now look favorably upon the fact that, in the name of saving Spain, the supposed center-right of the PP corners the PSOE in these negotiations and agrees with the ultra-right Vox on a purge of the high court.

I read on the front page of El País that “Juan Carlos I renounces the 65 million he gave to Corinna Larsen”. But what strikes me most is that they refer to her as “his ex-partner”. I think about the tortuous path the press has had to travel to finally call things by their name. What the royal household once accepted defining as an “intimate friend” –although I don’t know if, given the nature of the relationship, bringing up guts was a good semantic idea– the more monarchist media persisted in treating her with questionable euphemisms such as “special friend” or “close friend”. It took a few more scandals to break, for him to abdicate, and for him to put a few thousand kilometers of distance between them to finally be able to call her his “mistress” in the press. It is a more accurate term, because it frankly captures the recreational activities they indulged in, but it still evokes a fleeting relationship, of sporadic and clandestine encounters, it was great, I’ll call you later, and then each to their own home. That El País speaks of her in terms of an ex-partner is a whole other kettle of fish and the term helps to understand some dynamics like this peculiar 65 million little Bizum that will remain unpunished. “Keep this for a while, queen,” Juan Carlos might have told her, before putting his hand over his mouth and exclaiming “Oops, sorry!”.

The campaign is looking messy, but I already have my raincoat on so that the mud slides off me, literally and metaphorically. And so, with my hood up, I can still smile when I see that El Mundo titles its Friday front page: “Sánchez will announce the pension increase two days before 29-N”. Explained like this, it seems as if they have dusted off the crystal ball and that the PSOE leader is coming up with populist and desperate measures to save his electoral numbers. In reality, what is happening is that the National Statistics Institute will publish the inflation data on November 27 and it will not be until then that pensions can be updated taking this figure into account, since 2022, the improvement of contributory pensions has been linked to the CPI (calculated between December of the previous year and November of the current fiscal year). Surely there is electoral trickery and these factors have been weighed when deciding the date, but it is the same cunning that El Mundo resorts to when it seeks to deflate the issue and portray Sánchez as a crook. La Razón does something similar: “Díaz will raise the minimum wage above inflation before 29-N”.

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.

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.

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.