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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Yesterday I made a list of the main morning radio programs, both in Catalonia and Spain, and both from generalist and music stations, to denounce that next season –barring any surprises– all magazines will be led by men. But it is true that I did not indicate any audience cutoff, so some readers who have sent me three names are right: Gemma Nierga on Ràdio 4, Mercè Raga on Ràdio Estel, and Marina Fernàndez on SER Catalunya. In all three cases, we are talking about a following that is one or two orders of magnitude lower than what RAC1 and Catalunya Ràdio achieve. In the end, the three combined do not even reach 5% of what Jordi Basté achieves on any given Tuesday. But this is not a demerit of theirs: all three are solid and solvent professionals who make programs where the lack of budget is compensated by good craft and know-how. What happens is that they are in structures that do not play in the same league: one radio station is very niche and the other two have a big house like SER and RNE that inevitably places them in a secondary position. That said, all my respect for their contribution to radio Catalan, which may be modest from a quantitative point of view, but important in terms of providing plurality to the landscape.

The analysis of whether Àngels Barceló's departure from SER has political motivations and whether it should be read as a right-wing shift by the Prisa group is overlooking another aspect, one that is indeed unequivocal and not subject to more or less interested speculation: the mess that next season's radio dial will be, both in Catalonia and Spain, in terms of morning programming. Because the Catalan journalist, the only woman left hosting a morning magazine, will be replaced by Aimar Bretos.

If Sánchez can extend his term to the maximum – and God knows that would fit his survivor's nature – the next elections could fall in August 2027. This has alerted several media outlets on the hard right, who directly equate it to a fraud: they consider that since the rich take more holidays than the poor, the right-wing vote is penalized, said broadly. This is the thesis of an editorial in Ok diario, which headlines with the Spanish word pucherazo, and adds that, besides the holiday issue, the fact that for the justice system that is an inauspicious month also weighs in. Periodista Digital also speaks of “malpractice of the electoral calendar” in the face of hypothetical elections in August that no one has confirmed. Is there cunning in this possible choice? Surely: as every time a politician decides the date of the elections. Of course, there is a calculation. But brandishing the ghost of fraud is dangerous, because it feeds narratives of stolen elections, which are the antechamber to denying the legitimacy of the resulting governments and, therefore, open the door – taken to the extreme – to monstrosities like the assault on the United States Capitol, to cite an already occurred example.

The newspaper Levante has had to apologize for publishing a manipulated cover photograph. The image showed a demonstration of teachers in defense of public education and there was a detail that drew a lot of attention: the banner that dominated the frame bore the initials of the USTEC union. Which was strange, because the C of USTEC corresponds to the C of Catalonia and, therefore, its scope of action does not include the Valencian Country. The newspaper gave the following explanation the next day: "The main photograph on the cover of our printed edition was retouched to maximize the impact of the image, using a digital tool. As a result of the digital treatment, some elements were removed and by mistake, non-existent initials were introduced on the original banner". Even more astonishing is the subtitle, which says: "A photograph that erroneously introduced initials". The subject of the sentence is "A photograph", so we must understand that the image itself came to life and began to modify itself, in an act of rebellion against the reality it had just portrayed.

One of the dysfunctions of journalism occurs when the hunt against a character is opened and then a anything goes is declared that often causes secondhand embarrassment. The newspaper Abc dedicated a whole piece to analyzing what they ate at La Moncloa in Zapatero's time. They take his wife, Sonsoles Espinosa, and describe her as a kind of food Taliban, with phrases like “a very specific and non-negotiable routine”, “a rule that was repeated practically every day”, “a particularly strict dietary discipline”, “rutines that completely marked the usual functioning of the presidential kitchens”. You read on and, in the end, you realize that this reign of terror in the kitchen was, basically, prioritizing plant-based foods as the basis of the diet and preferring fish as animal protein, over red meat. In other words, what all nutritionists recommend if you want to buy as few numbers as possible in the lottery of heart attack or colon cancer.

A judge has fined El Jueves 6,000 euros for naming the president of the Abogados Cristianos foundation "Idiot of the Year". She states that freedom of expression does not cover insult. This is not a ruling that makes me happy, because El Jueves accompanied me for years and years, when "idiot" was not even a monthly or annual designation, but weekly. And nothing happened, because the word was used in the most popular register. In the end, nobody likes being called names, but within the framework of a satirical magazine, a certain broadness of mind is understood. Or a little flexibility on the part of the alleged offended party. I remember at the beginning of starting this column, cough, cough, that the good people at Alerta Digital felt offended by a "Stop the presses" and dedicated the infamous article titled "The little shit of Mr. Gutiérrez" to me, which had the merit of having been written – according to their own confession – by reading only the lines that non-subscribers were allowed to sample. It was so over the top that, frankly, it made me burst out laughing, and it never occurred to me to consider taking legal action because my most esteemed surname had been splashed with brownish tones.

The UCO IS LIKE those handbags without compartments, which always when you stick your hand in up to your elbow, something unexpected comes out. Only that instead of a pack of tissues, a matchbox from a pretentious hotel or an umbrella cover (but not the umbrella), out comes a small file, some unpublished documents, or a piece of research that hadn't emerged until now. One factor unites all these sudden appearances: they arrive at the precise moment to tip the scales of public opinion. The new UCO report has generated headlines such as “The UCO confirms that Begoña Gómez used Complutense software for commercial purposes and manipulated contracts (“El Debate)” or “The UCO detects 'premeditated awards' or 'without complying with regulations' in the UCAM software for Begoña Gómez (“El Español)”. But also “The UCO concludes that Begoña Gómez's chair was created in accordance with the norm (“La Vanguardia)” or “The UCO finds no opaque income for Begoña Gómez in its latest report on the case (“Eldiario.es)”. And so on for all of them: the trench media squeeze every leak to make it pass, with a hammer blow, through the hole of their editorial alliances.

Through WhatsApp, the fish dies and Zapatero is currently a good cod trapped in a network of messages that do not leave him in a particularly dignified position. However, the more than 300 pages of conversations and investigations circulating allow us to highlight worrying aspects of his role in the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra without also getting entangled in the weeds of journalistic plots. ABC opened its front page with: “Zapatero suddenly canceled a mortgage of 500,000 euros.” Said like that, the image that comes to mind is that of the man taking wads of bills out of his trench coat and placing them on the bank counter with an overbearing gesture. The newspaper, moreover, states in the first subtitle: “The amount is similar to the sum of the alleged illegal commission that the judge suspects he received for acting as an intermediary in the rescue of the Plus Ultra line.” Oh, the insinuations. Oh, oh, the juxtapositions. Oh, oh, oh, the similar things.similar.

The departure of Àngels Barceló from the SER fuels the theory that the group is veering to the right. There are reasons to support this. 1) Prisa's president, Joseph Oughourlian, is chastened by the attempted mutiny mounted by executives closest to Moncloa, when they wanted to launch a television in greater glory for the PSOE. Barceló, in this struggle, did not distance himself enough from the rebels. 2) Oughourlian owes Sánchez one, because his government maneuvered to favor a change in the group's board of directors as retaliation for having torpedoed that Telepedro that could not be. This explains, for example, the hardening of the editorial line that El País has experienced, since Jan Martínez Ahrens became its director. 3) Pepa Bueno ended up jumping from El País during the purges following the mutiny, and Barceló was also mentioned in those speculations. However, it was more complicated to apply the cut in his case because he is the radio host with the largest audience in all of Spain: 3.3 million daily listeners. No small matter when he decides to speak.

Great uproar among the readers of The New York Times over a column by Nicholas Kristof that talks about sexual abuse committed against Palestinians by Israelis, including cases of inciting dogs to penetrate victims. The noise has been significant enough for the newspaper to publish a piece in which the author and the head of Opinion responded to some of the most frequent questions the piece generated. It was questioned, for example, whether the sources were reliable, and both the newspaper and the journalist detailed why they considered them to be. Here, the applied criterion was interesting: the political support that an entity may give does not automatically disqualify it. That said, I add, ways must be found to contrast it with independent sources (as Kristof has done, speaking directly with some of the victims).

The book is called The future of truth [The future of truth] and contains interesting reflections on the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives. One of the quotes included is from journalist Kara Swisher and says: “The most sophisticated AI model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulated, but hollow beneath the surface, ultimately. It is not constrained by Asimov's laws or any other ethical framework, but is bound by the patterns of the data it has been trained on and the goals set by its creators”. There's a problem, though. Swisher never said that. Apparently, an AI supplied the author of the essay, Steven Rosenbaum, with an invented statement. “Besides, I sound like I'm talking with a stick up my ass,” denounced the affected party by the umpteenth hallucination of these nice text generators that when they don't find something they invent it, and off they go. Of course, the fact that a good handful of fake quotes created by AI have been detected in a book that aims to warn about the problems of this technology is, to say the least, ironic.

The imputation is a judicial figure that places the accused in limbo: the judge has detected enough evidence to open a case against him, but many things still have to happen before reaching a firm conviction. And yet, the media penalty begins to be paid immediately. The Zapatero case is paradigmatic. El País, for example, shows respect for the procedural moment he is in and headlines using formulas such as "The Court attributes to him...", "The investigation maintains..." or "The judge implicates him...". Afterwards, in the editorial, it admits that all of this exudes a worrying stench and that "the word lawfare, a way of sowing generalized doubts about justice to politically protect oneself from proceedings, is out of place in this case", but the information is careful not to anticipate events. That of the presumption of innocence, in short.

More predictable than an episode of House, the 'cave' has not failed in its custom of blaming Pedro Sánchez for the poor Andalusian regional results, as it did before with those of Extremadura, Aragón, and Castille and León. It is a common practice of the Madrid press, which inevitably applies its centralist steamroller and subjugates provincial elections to its national agenda – with a very Castilian 'ce' –; that is, to the assault on Moncloa. “Sánchez does not blame himself after four defeats”, headlines Abc. “Sánchez depresses his mayors and barons: “They don't see us as winners””, opens the front page of El Mundo: “They don’t see us as winners,” opens front page The charm of this narrative is that it coexists with a secondary spin-off, which is trying to show Feijóo's best smile, and to do so, they put a photo of the leader surrounded by his people. If there were ever an Oscar for best forced composure, here are some clear and sure winners. As much as they talk about Sánchez's failures, let's briefly examine this regional cycle for the popular candidate. In Andalusia, they have lost their absolute majority and five seats; in Aragón, they lose two seats while Vox gains seven; in Extremadura, they aspired to an absolute majority and do not achieve it (while Abascal's party skyrockets and can exert more influence), and in Castille and León, they also depend on the far-right, despite being the only place where they have managed to gain more than their rivals... and future partners. Considering the absolute disaster that Sánchez is according to their narrative, Feijóo's result has the strength of decaffeinated American coffee with skim milk and a hospital vending machine sweetener. Do you remember the 'Feijóo effect' that was the inevitable refrain of all these media not so long ago? Indeed, neither do they.