The letter X will haunt Felipe González wherever he goes, and the anti-Sanchista press wants to take advantage of the trial of Ábalos and his associates so that the current president also bears the weight of being at the apex of a criminal organization. The judge is not assigning any criminal responsibility to anyone beyond those seated in the dock, and there are newspapers on the right that are already satisfied with this trophy, which is no small feat. La Razón, for example, headlines: "The dozen pieces of evidence from the UCO that demolish Ábalos for his 'fundamental role'." On the other hand, for the hungry jaws of El Mundo, the ex-minister's bones are not enough to satisfy, because it needs to believe it can sink its fangs into a juicier jugular. And that's why it leads the front page with the headline: "Ábalos gave the highest level to the scheme: 'they have access to the president'." This practice of turning the words of the accused – who, understandably, try to shift blame and responsibility – into biblical truths is a curious and profoundly asymmetrical practice: I don't recall the conservative press sanctioning Bárcenas's words when he started to spill the beans.

El Mundo publishes exclusively this Monday the WhatsApp messages regarding the expulsion of Javier Ortega Smith from Vox. The information is quite revealing, because it shows that it is not enough to agree on it with the leadership, but that it must then be executed in a very specific way, which is by also expelling Javier Ortega Smith from the formation's WhatsApp groups. And this apparently was not so simple. In one of the screenshots published by the newspaper, it can be seen how the general secretary, Ignacio Garriga, informs of the decision in one of these groups: "Javier, the national executive committee has unanimously agreed (19 yeses) on your dismissal as a member. Please, leave the group".

It is already known that the first victim of a war is truth and that, for governments, especially in times of war, doing journalism is unpatriotic because certain sensitive information cannot be revealed to the enemy. Media outlets always face this dilemma in times of war, as part of their readership may buy into this message, and therefore, the New York Times has been forced to educate its readers.

Trump's first term already began with a disturbing logical aberration. His chief advisor tried to argue that when the president claimed his inauguration had been more crowded than Obama's —despite photographs clamorously evidencing the opposite— it was because he worked with “alternative facts.” Now, his most privileged disciple, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has dealt an even bigger blow to rationality. In a parliamentary statement, he was asked about the mathematical absurdity Trump had uttered when claiming he was lowering drug prices by 600% (which, if true, would mean that remedy would have a negative price five times its original value; in other words, you'd buy it and they'd pay you a fortune). Instead of admitting it was a slip-up, Kennedy let loose the following gem: “The president has another way of calculating percentages.” Yes, specifically a mistaken one. At least now we're starting to understand his great eye for business, especially when it comes to sinking the casinos he could build thanks to his dad's inheritance. Bring the calculator, and I'll tell you how much we're earning. The satirical medium The Onion hit the nail on the head as always when it published the headline “Trump announces a 5,000% increase in numbers.”

The arithmetic forces the PP to make a pact with Vox and, therefore, to assume part of their program and ideology. The conservative press tries to defuse the notion that this constitutes a somewhat humiliating act of submission –they, who precisely have this verb always at their fingertips– and that is why one comes across headlines like Wednesday's in la Razón: “Imminent pact in Aragon with «national priority» and no change in immigration”. Meanwhile, El País squeezes Feijóo and company's dangerous friendships as much as possible and opens its front page with “The PP assumes Vox's idea of «national priority»”. In the initial paragraph, they explain that this principle “points to the discrimination of foreigners”. The drama of it all is that the reader who does their homework and informs themselves from more than one medium with non-coinciding editorial lines ends up confused and not quite knowing whether the popular party has indeed succumbed to xenophobic policies or if it is Vox who has settled for a semantic gesture –this unsettling thing of national priority– devoid of content because what counts is rootedness, regardless of origin. Polarization is a close cousin of confusion. And a twin of disaffection.

Demana el Marca in an editorial sense that teams whose fans boo the Spanish anthem be expelled for a year from the Copa del Rey. The newspaper recalls, in a separate piece, that Law 39/1981 includes the penalty for "outrage to the national flag" and recalls that in China you can get up to ten years in prison for crimes as vaguely defined as "causing trouble". An interesting reference, the one from China, comrades. They could also ask to execute them directly, and charge the families for the bullet, as the so-called zidan fei used to dictate in the past. What the hell, I would extend the punitive policy to everyone who doesn't cheer for the king. And to Florentino Pérez, since we're at it: this authoritarianism thing, it spreads quickly. It's funny that they say that booing is a goal for politics in sports and that, at the same time, a sports newspaper gets involved with this political proclamation, prohibiting a harmless act protected by freedom of expression.

La Razón opens its front page with “Public-private healthcare receives international praise”. They don't specify it until the subtitle, but they are talking about Madrid's model, which, as they reveal, has received the endorsement of a study published in one of the scientific journals of the group The New England Journal of Medicine. The study assures that 262 euros per patient are saved in the public system, mortality decreases, and satisfaction soars. The editorial, on the subject, criticizes Pedro Sánchez and is titled “When ideology disregards patients”. There are also cases where ideology disregards readers, like this one we are addressing. I'll explain.

Poor New York Times. In the Sunday edition, they printed a crossword puzzle with the wrong grid, and poor readers wracked their brains trying to solve what didn't fit anywhere. Quickly, they issued a correction, but the damage was done, for those who bought the paper edition. Crosswords, of course, are not immune to errors, and in fact, the English name itself (crossword) is actually a typographical error. A violinist and editor, named Arthur Wynne, invented the modern form of this pastime, which experienced great growth during World War I, as a way to escape after reading the striking war chronicles of the time. Many decades later, today's readers still seek this refuge that trains their brains. However, the original was born as wordcross until someone wrote it incorrectly, and it turns out that the error was fortunate enough to become the preferred way to call it ever since.

The former Polish Prime Minister and current opposition leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, stated at a press conference that Péter Magyar, the triumphant winner of the Hungarian elections, had killed the family dog by turning on the microwave with the puppy inside. He attributed it to the memoirs written by his ex-wife, but it turns out that neither the ex-wife has published any book nor is there any record of Magyar cooking dogs like one prepares microwave popcorn. It all stems from a news report from a media outlet created just two days before this scandalous fake news was launched, which analysts link to one of the groups that carry out these types of operations for the Kremlin. The act of saying your enemy devours pets is known to yield good results, as Trump demonstrated a couple of years ago, with a Facebook post claiming that Haitian migrants in Springfield (Ohio) were capturing and eating neighborhood pets.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the newspaper Avui, which emerged from a campaign that today we would call crowdfunding and was then called the acquisition of co-partners: private individuals who put in money without expecting dividends or editorial control. El Punt Avui has commemorated it with a supplement of those hefty tomes where the bulk of the right-hand pages are institutional advertisements and on the left, in this case, there is a multitude of interviews with people who were present at the beginnings of the newspapers. I will stick with the interview with Jaume Guillamet, one of the most brilliant minds we have on Catalan press matters. He was deputy director of Avui and the passage of time allows him to openly explain Jordi Pujol's role in the newspaper. One of the questions is: “Did what Lluís Foix says about Pujol interviewing himself in La Vanguardia happen at Avui?”. And Guillamet replies: “I remember a call one day when Maluquer wasn't there. President Pujol is passed to me and dictates an editorial about the Loapa to me”. These are things that are also explained by the fact that the chairman of the board of directors of Avui was, at the same time, chairman of the parliamentary group of Convergència i Unió. However, despite this clear desire to manage the editorial steering wheel, the emeritus professor recalls that Pujol's newspaper was not actually that one, but rather El Correo Catalán. That is the medium he bets on, putting money into it and investing personally, while the other is left to the mercy of the little capital – however heroic it may have been – of the co-partners.

Madrid's sports press, that is to say, Madrid's, was dressed in black today to mark the white club's elimination from the Champions League. “What an injustice!”, pointed out Marca. “Until the referee wanted it,” added As. It was an indignation that moved one to pity, especially when one remembered that, just twenty-four hours earlier, a robbery had put a halt to Barça's aspirations in the same competition. But of course, since the opponent was Atlético de Madrid, the headlines then were “Heroic,” with six exclamation marks, and “Epic,” respectively. In fact, the Prisa newspaper busied itself with calling Eric García's expulsion “fair” on its front page. Of course, not a single reprimand for similar or even clearer fouls by the white and reds that were not whistled, such as the push on Dani Olmo inside the box. Or what about Pau Cubarsí's red card, in the first leg, which according to various analysts should have been a yellow.

One of the problems with vertical organizations is that everyone wants to talk to the top boss but their time is limited. Mark Zuckerberg plans to solve this by creating a virtual avatar of himself, which imitates his tone of voice, appearance, and gestures, created with artificial intelligence and trained with his entire corpus as a top executive. It is the apotheosis of the dehumanization of social networks that promised us the Xanadu of universal connection and horizontal communications. Now, employees of Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp will no longer speak directly to their boss or through the intermediate ranks that primarily serve this purpose, but will chat with him. If the practice extends to other companies, the result could be a festival. If you want a salary increase, press 1. If you want to be served in Catalan, hang up, annoying.

Sports journalism has become complicated because big stars now live sequestered and it is much more difficult to access them. With culture, the same thing happens: more and more major international concerts impose stricter restrictions on the access of photojournalists. The case of Rosalía is emblematic. In La Vanguardia, the chronicle of her concert in Madrid was a mobile phone photograph taken by the editor. It filled the space intended for the image, of course, but it did not have the quality standard of a portrait taken with a professional camera and from the pit, a few meters from the action. A photojournalist who had worked for the publication complained about the intrusion, but –although she was right in substance– it is also true that the primary obligation is to the reader, who would not understand a full-page chronicle without a photograph of the event (unless, as an act of protest, the media as a whole agreed to publish a black box, with a brief explanatory text). In El Periódico they opted to publish a past snapshot from the Brit Awards, which had nothing to do with the concert. On the ARA website, the chronicle of the Lyon concert featured a photo taken by the author of the chronicle between midnight and two in the morning, which was when Live Nation deigned to provide the official images (also a bad solution, because it goes against the basic principle of being the one who chooses the photograph that best represents that show).

It cannot be a coincidence that the rise of the far-right and neo-authoritarianism in half the world and the radical change in the communication landscape, a result of the empire of the algorithm. And yet, there are still those who consider that the internet giants have a progressive political tendency. Newsbusters is a tired MAGA lobby that tries to adopt the forms of a verification service. The latest of its reports is a mess in which it is claimed that, of nearly 200 analyzed news items collected by the Google News service, 183 are from media outlets they consider left-wing, but only six belong to conservative media. In fact, only Fox News manages to have its material selected. In the case of progressive brands, they point to such diverse media outlets as The Guardian, CNN, Associated Press, Al-Jazeera, and the BBC. Grouping them all together is a blatant audacity, but what is embarrassing is that they do not see that the big difference between Fox News, and let's say the BBC, is not ideology, but professional practice. While the British corporation, with all its biases and imperfections, still retains prestige and its professionals mostly observe the basic principles of factual journalism, Trump's favorite channel has long since bent any principle of reality to its political and ideological agenda. Google News is not choosing according to ideology –little more amoral than the algorithm–, but based on a series of criteria, among which is prestige, alas.The principle is clear: under the pretext that traditional media have biases –and yes, they do–, they defend proposals that don't even pass the slightest cotton wool test. In fact, one of the main problems of our era is, precisely, to champion honest journalism (however imperfect it may be) that has left home with a knife in hell in its jacket.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on British ministers to get tough on social media giants to stop disinformation. The plea comes after the publication of a study which found that hostile narratives against immigration have soared, linking it to a (false) increase in criminality in the city. Specifically, in the last two years, messages describing London as a particularly dangerous place have increased by between 150% and 200%, while content denouncing the impact of migration on the country's capital has risen by 350%.

María Rey is president of the Association of the Press of Madrid (APM). She is also the main presenter of the morning magazine 120 minutos on Telemadrid, a channel criticized by the works council and unions for following a line blatantly aligned with President Ayuso. The program is made by Ana Rosa Quintana's production company. Before that, she had spent almost a quarter of a century at Antena 3, a channel with a conservative profile. Mónica Tourón Torrado is secretary general of the APM. In her written press career, her time at the conservative Abc and Faro de Vigo stands out. Francisco Sierra is the vice president of the APM. He maintains a weekly column in The Objective where, week in and week out, he criticizes socialists. He also has decades of experience at Atresmedia. Luis Ayllón Alonso is first vice president and spokesperson for the APM. He has been diplomatic correspondent for the newspaper Abc and collaborates with media hostile to the PSOE, such as El Confidencial Digital. In short, I think the pattern is quite clear. Or, taking advantage of the acronyms of this entity, we could also say –with permission from the program produced by Antoni Bassas– that of... Any More Questions? Well no, there are no more questions.

Not the Com si fos ahir from TV3, nor the best of Turkish soap operas: the week's serial has been the tug-of-war between José Manuel Villarejo and Javier Ruiz. “Javierito, we've been such good friends in the past... Unbelievable!”, the ex-commissioner snapped at him live. The other jumped like a spring and assured that it was a lie and that they didn't even know each other. But Villarejito has everything saved and, a few hours later, his friend Eduardo Inda published in OK Diario a very brief fragment of a phone conversation in which the journalist, when his interlocutor told him he was bothering him, told him: “Don't bother me. We'll talk and, if there's any news we're going to release, I'll let you know”. The presenter of Mañaneros 360 on La1 had to admit that he had forgotten this conversation.

The Kitchen case is being judged and one of the accused is the one who in this column I called for a time Minister of the Past, due to the sinister echoes of past eras that it evoked in me. Now the prosecutor is asking for 15 years in prison and 33 years of disqualification, and the newspaper La Razón has activated all its machinery to try to dilute his possible responsibility. Let's remember that the former minister collaborates with the newspaper and that the director of the medium, Francisco Marhuenda, was appointed honorary commissioner during his term. The most hilarious piece, out of desperation, is titled “The Kitchen case evidences the political X that never sits on the defendant's bench.” It is evident that X, in this country and universe, undeniably refers to Felipe González, whom many assumed was the one embodying the unknown in the GAL equation. Therefore, the headline is a trench stab at the then president, Mariano Rajoy, with the attempt to make people believe that Fernández Díaz was merely a pawn – a mandao– who executed the order to spy on Bárcenas, which originated “from Moncloa” as suggested.

Arturo San Agustín explained the tribulations of a reporter who, after spending half an hour deciding whether to spell it Gorbachov or Gorbachov – this was before the internet, of course – ended up assigning him the position of President of the United States. The anecdote is a fable about the inevitability of typos: when you look to one side, it ambushes you right there. The "New York Times" published a headline on both sides that read: "A North America Treaty Organization without America?". Once it was printed, they realized that the N in NATO doesn't stand for North, but for North Atlantic. Consequently, a good part of the headline's intention is lost.

The giants of artificial intelligence face the same moral dilemma that confronted social media two decades ago, when they began their rapid expansion: responsibility or profits. And we already know what they chose. I read that OpenAI has decided to withdraw Sora2, the application that allowed the creation of realistic videos with utmost ease. The result of this ease? According to the Brazilian fact-checker Aos Fatos, four out of ten videos made with this tool that went viral spread diverse disinformation, often about supernatural disasters or public safety issues. But the company also responsible for ChatGPT has not canceled the service due to an attack of responsibility: it simply wants to put its eggs in another basket, that of trying to integrate AI into robots to solve physical tasks. At least, since the computing requirements are not as intensive as hundreds of thousands of lunatics trying to poison the networks, there will also be an environmental benefit, in addition to the informational one.