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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Look at what happens for a conservative medium, but Abc served these days an intense session of twerking with Catalan Alliance. It interviewed its candidate for Barcelona, Jordi Aragonès, and he extracted the headline “We must not confront Catalans and Spaniards, the common enemy is the caliphate”. Well, more than he extracted it, he pulled it out, because this phrase does not appear in the interview but is made up of two pieces corresponding to two different questions. The idea of Islamism as a factor of brotherhood between the two parties does not appear explicitly in the conversation. And, in fact, the interviewee has retweeted a fragment of his answer on social media to show that the headline did not match the idea expressed in the answer. The introduction to the interview also draws attention, where it says: “This young professor – from a subsidized school – is also the ideologue of the formation led by Sílvia Orriols, framed in radical secessionism and xenophobia, a qualification that Aragonès does not like, but does not refute”. This ability to see the xenophobia of Catalan Alliance but not that of Vox is moving.

The question is not just a rhetorical, parlor exercise, but has relevant consequences. This was raised this week by the Columbia Journalist Review and an expert in law and information explained that the debate is not concluded, but that she considered that no, that generative artificial intelligences do not create "expression", because there is no communicative intention. I agree. Chats only provide a mere reflexive response – however complex – where the algorithm plays with probabilities to satisfy what the user expects to receive. There have already been two concrete cases in the United States where this scrutiny of AI has been tested. First, with that chatbot that encouraged a teenager to commit suicide. Second, with a response from Chat GPT that is considered to have been instrumental in preparing a mass shooting. The first case was resolved with an out-of-court settlement and the second is just beginning to be investigated. Technology companies, needless to say, are asking for their applications to be protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, where freedom of expression is fiercely guaranteed.

Headline on the front page of Abc: “The captain of the PSOE sewers mediated to help the investigated”. When I read it, I thought the newspaper was trying to create a kind of character, like Captain Lettuce, Captain Pescanova or Captain Mondongo. This "Capitán de las Cloacas" – in the Spanish of the original version the sound is even harsher and more caricatured – has a touch of Mortadelo and Filemón. But it turns out not to be so, it's about a real Civil Guard captain, of flesh and blood and a tricorn hat, so it's the reality of the balance of powers in Spain that emulates the feverish comics of master Ibáñez. Not a day goes by that the word "sewer" appears on one front page or another of the right-wing newspapers. How do the pillars of sanchismo counter this? With synchronized polls.

TV3 has been the leader for 16 consecutive years. It was before the most effervescent phase of the Process, during the years it rowed in favor of the independence project and with the current stage of managing the hangover, in which the nationalist brake has been applied, as a result of having three parties in its governing council with divergent country models such as ERC, PSC, and Junts. They are three different TV3s, but all three are leaders. And there are those who dislike this. Crónica Global wrote the piece “TV3 sees its audience leadership in danger”. They referred to the fact that in June it dropped one and a half points, to 12.9%, while La 1 rose to 12.6%. But the May results are completely distorted by a small television affair that the reader has probably heard mentioned in passing in a snatched conversation called the Football World Cup. If in prime time, in this era of audience fragmentation, achieving 15% already justifies bathing in underpants at the Font Màgica de Montjuïc, 40%, 50%, and even some 60% make for a whole orgy.

What we have traditionally called the right has achieved two undeniable victories. The first is the shift of economic issues to its own territory. Both the PSOE and El País are considered left-wing, but only by simple opposition: what they defend in terms of money is different, but in no way do they represent the two equidistant extremes of the center of the same axis. The second victory is the erosion of the left-wing brand, which in Spain had a good press, even if only as a reaction to Francoism: now it is associated among a good part of the electorate with naive do-goodism, corruption, or arrogant moral superiority. To be fair, part of these considerations have been earned through hard work and their own merits. 

To no one's surprise, the pact between PP and Vox in Andalusia has been consummated, executed in two stages for the sake of decorum. If one reads the right-wing newspapers, it might seem that Abascal's party has graciously ceded its support for a few peanuts, half a lemon from the back of the fridge, and a packet of Pop Rocks. "Moreno is re-invested after ceding a vice-presidency to Vox in a minimalist pact," headlines El Mundo, in a rather discreet module on its front page. "Moreno signs 'stability' in exchange for a vice-presidency," reiterates La Razón. Bringing it to the realm of positions defuses the political weight of the most worrying measures and dilutes everything into an exchange of trading cards on a Sunday at the Sant Antoni Market. Furthermore, it is already known that vice-presidencies often have a more ornamental than executive flair. And invoking stability makes the whole thing a matter of responsibility. But even Planeta's newspaper eventually admits afterwards that 150 measures have been signed. Good thing it was minimalist.

The cave is never happy. They roared so much against the disintegration of Spain by separatist movements, and now that they have the opportunity to demographically consolidate a state with a negative natural growth balance with measures such as the regularization of immigrants and the 'ley de nets', everything is problems. Regarding the newcomers, there's no need to overthink it: old xenophobia is mixed with the legitimate debate about integration, although the harsh (and perverse) reality is that entire sectors of the Spanish economy would collapse if the import of cheap labor were stopped. The 'ley de nets' offers more possibilities, because the PP had supported it. It is true that an instruction has now been introduced that expands cases and allows for easier naturalization. If before it was necessary to justify having suffered family exile, now economic reasons can also be invoked for having left Spain at the time. But behind these economic exiles there was often also the hand of Francoism, which favored its supporters with tobacconists and lottery agencies while silencing and repressing those who returned. Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marías, is a very good novel for understanding the ostracism to which many republicans, like the author's father, were subjected.

Iñaki Gabilondo has found himself embroiled in a controversy as the host of the program La gran aventura de la lengua española, on La1, by stating that Spanish was never imposed in Latin America through conquest. It is true that the great Hispanization of these territories came later, when, once they became republics, they opted to promote a state language, and Spanish was the best positioned considering its implementation in structures such as administration, school, or church. I wonder why, of course. Perhaps because from 1550 to 1782, the different kings issued a minimum of 32 decrees that urged education in Spanish for indigenous communities? The will to Hispanize was unequivocal, as a way of imposing religion, even though the harsh reality was that there were not enough personnel to do so, so in the end the priests sent to the New World understood that it was more practical for them to learn the local languages.

The yellow jersey of linguistic hypocrisy is put on for another day The World, with the article: “Illa imposes Catalan at the Tour: ‘It must be your initial language.’”. They are referring to the Volunteer Manual drafted by the Generalitat, which explains that Catalan should be used in the first instance. This is presented by the newspaper with the usual coercive verbs: “imposes,” “forces,” and even mentions the “linguistic doctrine of marginalizing Spanish.” One only needs to walk around the city for ten minutes to know that if there is a language being sidelined, it is not Bertín Osborne’s, but the newspaper applies the same policy as with immersion in schools, which is to maliciously confuse what a document says with harsh reality. Because the abstract volunteer who reads the manual will end up doing what their personal triumph arch dictates, since Salvador Illa – as they personalize it in the headline, we will do so here too – will not be chasing after these collaborators to check if they have prioritized Catalan. Furthermore, as is finally recognized The World in the midst of his convoluted prose of grievances, “the Generalitat grants volunteers the possibility of 'adapting to the interlocutor's language'”. Big fans of the use of grant as a verb, in this sentence, full of intention.

Among climate deniers, a very stubborn strain is the one that clings to a particularly hot summer in the past to say that, you see, it has always been hot, some years less, some years more. This is not only done by the stereotypical brother-in-law caricature – brilliantly portrayed by Jordi Soriano in "Polònia" – but also by supposedly serious media outlets that subscribe to this practice. This is the case with the Telegraph, which has been on a worrying downward trend for some years. The United Kingdom is experiencing a hellish week by its standards, with temperatures exceeding 37 degrees, and the newspaper published an article titled “The heatwave hysterics wouldn’t have lasted a day in 1976”. They have chosen to highlight what was a particularly fiery summer to deny climate change, despite the avalanche of data suggesting that, beyond a specific record, the temperature is increasing at lightning speed. In fact, the five hottest summers, globally, are not that 1976, but all belong to the 21st century. And in the 30 years between 1970 and 1999, there were only three summers in which Britons exceeded 35 degrees, while in the 26-odd years we have had since then, there have already been nine in which this temperature has been reached. The same Telegraph, when the historic record of 40.3 degrees was broken in Coningsby in 2022, it rushed to publish an article saying that there were also scorching summers in the Edwardian era. Or we could also talk about that cover of The Spectator from 2019, which showed a drawing of planet Earth having a drink on the beach, with the headline “Relax, global warming is a myth”.