The figure of the fact-checker has been mythologized in recent times, due to the explosion of manipulations. But I regret to have to say that the fact-checkers are like Santa Claus. The fundamental job of any journalist is to verify that what they are about to say or write is true. We have given it a glitter of dignity and the exotic plume of the anglicism –mom, I'm not a journalist, I'm a fact-checker–, but the name does not make the thing. I was thinking about it seeing the recent controversy with the fact-checkers who have worked for Jordi Wild in his three electoral interviews. There is a moment when the youtuber tells Ada Colau that nine out of ten arrested for theft are of foreign origin. She denies it and he asks for help from the fact-checkers, who brandish a headline from El Mundo as proof. A cascade of criticism on social media, great indignation. But it is better not to jump to hasty conclusions.

The latest polls suggest that Alberto Núñez Feijóo will be able to govern with Vox, but he will likely do so while losing a good number of seats, which is a clear personal failure. Right-wing media outlets that, despite everything, are wary of Abascal’s party, are now trying to hit the brakes and help the Popular Party candidate, after having fed the beast throughout the entire legislative term. This explains the front page of Abc this Friday, the first day of the campaign, where a large photograph of Alberto Núñez Feijóo shaking hands with Jordi Wild is featured alongside the headline “A campaign with new rules.” All of this, of course, is an excuse to highlight that the PP leader allowed himself to be examined by the youtuber, while Abascal cancelled his commitment with flimsy and trivial excuses. Feijóo also features on the front page of La Razón, which is also very close to him, but not on that of El Mundo. And it is no coincidence: the newspaper most inclined toward Vox's positions prefers not to build up the expectations of the Popular Party and chooses for its front page a photograph of none other than Begoña Gómez. That is to say, the enemy. Once again, the newspaper stands as an example of emotional media that moves its readers not with the strength of information or arguments, but with hate. Because that, and no other, is the reaction they want to elicit in their readers when they paint their front page socialist red. If you don't go, they stay.

The Catalan press agrees on highlighting the great popular mobilization but also the uneven following of the strike. In Madrid, on the other hand, the right wing is very clear about it and sells it with its usual monochrome tone: “Electoral strike shipwrecks” (El Mundo) or “Total failure of the electoral strike” (La Razón). It is this permanent inability for nuance, for the little white dot within the yin or the black within the yang. More in the field of humor than that of journalism, I cannot help but record this headline from Ok Diario, faithful to its tradition of mudslingers: “Sánchez does not go on strike: Ok Diario catches him leaving Ferraz after recording another podcast”.

Vox feeds on victimhood, so it shouldn't come as a great surprise that, after two and a half hours of Santiago Abascal's intervention on La 1 in front of a presenter who was not up to the task, he still has the stomach to complain because they cut forty minutes. The fact that the party issues this outlandish statement can only be explained by a double intention: to continue paving the way to purge Televisión Española when it is convenient and, above all, to justify his fleeing from Jordi Wild, with whom he had signed a commitment to be interviewed without prior questions. Despite the moments of obvious discomfort –reflected in the telling rings under his armpits–, Vox managed to have its candidate come out victorious from that incursion into enemy territory thanks to having an interviewer who tried to make up for the lack of data with a dialectic as nervous as it was stumbling. But Wild promised to have a couple of people dedicated to verifying the accuracy of the statements made. And here, alas, is where the trouble lies.

I write this without sarcasm. The conversation between Broncano and Abascal –I refuse to call it an interview– was a disaster, as everyone has already pointed out. But since I am a Monty Python fan and I always look at the the bright side of life, I think there must have been a healthy consequence following the dismal day when, on public television, someone spoke of "hunting" immigrants and a bought-and-paid-for audience remained silent, validating dehumanizing rhetoric. Specifically, journalism was highlighted, which is not morally superior to entertainment but does have minimum requirements that Broncano did not meet. And I write this with sadness because I find him to be an intelligent, agile, and funny communicator: what he has achieved with La revuelta is very commendable. On the other hand, we will never know, but it would be good to determine if RTVE pressured him to bring on Abascal –knowing that Feijóo would not agree to go– in order to boost Vox at the expense of deflating the PP so that its result is similar to that of the PSOE.

If electoral polls are already quite indigestible midway through a legislative term, when the elections approach their intensity becomes parodic. This Monday, three newspapers opened their front pages with a survey, with very disparate data. El País was selling a “comeback” for the PSOE and granted it up to 123 seats in the best of scenarios, while La Razón stayed between 99 and 101. It would be unthinkable for it to be the other way around, which evidences the arbitrariness of these narrative-creation operations that polls are. Since the substance does not deserve much more commentary than analyzing the roll of some dice, it is more fun to focus on the semiotic details. For example, La Razón orders the parties by number of seats, and this makes the red of the PSOE –the most eye-catching color– occupy the center of the bar: here they were careless. El País orders the parties following the left-right axis. This allows one to see immediately the little piece missing for the socialists to aspire to a government majority and, above all, it sells the idea that the PSOE –the one of the non-repealed gag law, the one of the bogged-down housing decrees– is clearly left-wing. Looking at the data, by the way, I see that the vote percentages are not so disparate between newspapers: the kitchen of each publication must have made the doubtful seats fall in their favor, at their convenience.

I do not know if David Broncano was playing chicken game and invited Santiago Abascal to La revuelta with his fingers crossed very tightly, hoping the Vox member would decline the offer. If that was the case, it shows he does not understand how the far-right works, as they take advantage of any megaphone to launch their victimhood narrative, especially if they can go to RTVE to complain about public television (even though their presence on the show undermines part of their claims). In any case, it is incomprehensible that he agreed to Abascal's demand to record his interview without an audience. It would be like throwing in the towel and adopting an attitude of submission, which reveals the weakness of a brilliant presenter when you take him out of entertainment and comedy and face him against the game of the big players. He needed to hold his ground, against Vox... and against the network.

I asked five artificial intelligence agents to help me decide my vote for the 29-N election. It is not that I need it –outsourcing judgment, as popular as it is becoming, is not in my DNA–, but I was curious to see what they would answer. As expected, all five (Grok, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT) acted very dignified and told me that under no circumstances would they tell me which ballot to pick. That they cannot interfere in elections. Once I recovered from my fit of laughter, I asked them, “In what way can you influence people's votes through the algorithm?” and here they could not avoid admitting that there were multiple ways in which, whether intentionally or not, AIs have the ability to put their finger on the scale and favor one political option over another.

“Data kills narrative!”, exclaimed Javier Ruiz, editorial director of the new channel La Séptima on the day of its premiere. But this is an empty mantra, with the same truth as “Cat crushes duck with a cheap shoe”, because just because something rhymes doesn’t make it any truer, Bertha. The first impressions of the new channel have already been written by comrade Mònica Planas, with her usual precise scalpel. I only want to point out the intensive use of electoral polls: every night, the channel presents a tracking that presumably captures the moment, as if voters en masse thought one thing on Monday and something very different the next day. On the debut night, Ruiz said that media polls seek more to shape reality than to describe it. And that his –in which, oh surprise, the PSOE was winning–, on the other hand, was indeed accurate. The favored party rushed to retweet it, of course. But the viewer had no resources to evaluate its reliability. At least El País, for example, has the good habit of offering the data in the raw, in case someone wants to try to unravel the cooking that has been applied to them.

In recent times, various news stories have been accumulating that suggest a recentering of the British media. The trend was started by the conservative The Sun in the 2024 elections, when it gave explicit editorial support to the Labour Party's Keir Starmer over the Tories. It hadn't happened since 2005 and was interpreted as a turn towards slightly more moderate positions now that Lachlan Murdoch has taken the reins of his father's publishing empire. More recently, the Telegraph has changed hands and been acquired by the German group Axel Springer, which is also ideologically reorienting it. They want it to remain a conservative figurehead and try their luck at turning it into a global newspaper competing with the Wall Street Journal and, to achieve this, they have trimmed some of the more far-right leaning voices it contained. The most obvious example is Nigel Farage, who has seen his contract terminated, although his camp claims it was he who left, given the drift he observes in the newspaper, where other more extreme figures have lost their platform.

Of course it is no coincidence that the three media outlets that first leaked the audio from the Toledo accident, which pointed to human error, were El País, Eldiario.es and SER. And it is also not the result of a capricious alignment of the stars that, between the first and the last of these three, just over a minute passed. But this, per se, does not invalidate their informative value. Journalism is often built with clandestine bricks that a source elevates to the public because they want to achieve an effect. And this effect can be disinterested—beyond fulfilling a civic duty—or it can hide a particular interest. This is where the journalist's judgment comes into play, who must ask themselves whether allowing themselves to be instrumentalized obeys a higher good, such as bringing relevant information to society, or if they are simply participating in the promotion of a narrative and pushing for the wide side of the funnel.

Shock over the death of Jesús de Miguel, as a result of a very harsh tackle by the Andorra goalkeeper. The images are horrifying and have turned the clip viral. First problem: the exploitation of morbidity. Does the video have news value? Undoubtedly. But it is very different to show it as an element inserted into a general news story with an aseptic headline than to sell it with great fanfare, making the main draw the viewing of the unfortunate accident. "This was the play that ended in the death of Jesús de Miguel," cried a piece by La Sexta. Step right up, step right up and see. Or this yellow headline from El Español: "The tragedy of the deceased's wife: she watched the lethal kick to the chest from the stands with her one-year-old daughter."

The acrobat Pedro Sánchez had the right-wing newspapers nervous with his media appearances as an impassive rock star despite the storm. The unpublished polls—the ones that really matter—showed a certain comeback for the PSOE that unsettled those who have spent the legislature fueling his eviction from the Moncloa. Since the train accident in Toledo is a factor that can change everything, the press affiliated with the PP has rushed to conduct quick polls with the idea of fixing a Polaroid that stops this notion that el Perro might pull it off again. Thus, the surveys that pepper Monday only aim to justify headlines like “PSOE stops the comeback effect and the right consolidates its majority”, as written by La Razón, which treats PP-Vox as the “right-wing” vote while Podemos and the Broad Front are branded as “far-left”. In El Mundo they make an even coarser conversion between the accident that has caused 69 deaths—so far—and the fictitious electoral count that any poll is: “PSOE loses 450,000 votes and falls below 100 seats”. They haven't dared to add “due to the accident” at the end of the headline—as they do in so many other cases of custom-made demoscopy, attributing the reasons for rises or falls out of thin air—because it would be too obscene, but the idea is perfectly understood.

Considerable uproar on X because Javier Ruiz argues that if Antena 3 and Telecinco have an editorial line, La 1 must be able to adopt one, too. It seems to me an absurd question, because it is obvious: there is no media outlet in the world, on Mars or Raticulin without an editorial line. Choosing what opens a newscast, which news stories are left out, whether economic growth or safeguarding the planet is more important are inevitable decisions that shape a positioning. And, therefore, the problem is not whether the first channel of RTVE has an editorial line, but whether it turns out to be sectarian. That is to say, if in the definition of its positioning, partisan criteria are imposed over the rest. And one only needs to look at the list of presenters or the composition of the talk shows to surrender to the evidence that it is a channel that clearly favors one political option over the others.

If the news that Ok Diario had paid 242,000 euros for Koldo García's defense were not enough to make one's eyebrows arch higher than the oval of one's face, in pure exclamation, a circumstance is added that makes the affair even filthier. It turns out that the director of Eldiario.es, Ignacio Escolar, met with García's lawyer, Leticia de la Hoz, who is the one who collected the invoices on behalf of Eduardo Inda's digital outlet. The juiciest one, oh what a coincidence, coincided with the date on which the media outlet interviewed him so he could pull back the curtain and expose the miseries of the PSOE. After that meeting, a burly man approached Escolar to tell him that he had been taking pictures of him on the orders of the director of Ok Diario. A few minutes later, his mobile phone vibrated. It was Inda, with a message as brief as it was disturbing: “Ho, ho”. A while later, the photos appeared published and it was said that Eldiario.es was making things up and had “falsified the concepts” of the invoices.

There was expectation for Óscar Puente's appearance, to see if his resignation would occur, and the newspapers that wanted to see this fuse blow were trying to exert pressure from their front pages, while those closest to the PSOE continued to deepen the line of human error. "The Atocha controllers confused the protocol," they wrote in El País. On the other hand, in Abc the headline was: "Puente fired technicians and filled Adif's leadership with politicians". They accompanied it with a second news item: "Sánchez sidelines the minister he used as a battering ram", and then said that "he was not considering dismissing him so that the wear and tear would be focused on him, 'very affected emotionally'", with the use of cowardly quotation marks, which avoid indicating who is making that quote assessing the socialist's intimate state. The right-wing newspapers know that Puente, who had been mentioned as a successor to Sánchez, is now only a shadow: the lightning rod that, precariously, prevents electricity from being transmitted to the Spanish president. In fact, in the editorial that Abc published on Friday (therefore, before the appearance), they were not satisfied with the hypothetical resignation of Puente: "Responsibility cannot stop at an inept minister. It also reaches the president who appointed him, kept him in office and supported his management". In any case, the triple media right does not agree, because while here they suggest that he would like to leave and they won't let him, in El Mundo the headline suggested the opposite and a desire to cling to the armchair: "Puente's continuity divides the PSOE, while he buys time".

The Internet is the great steam engine of our times, which demands giant shovelfuls of coal to keep the information wheel turning. At times when a single event dominates the news, the chances of ending up throwing an incombustible rock that sparks into the boiler skyrocket. That is what happened to the magazine Hola!, whose courtly obsession played a bad trick on it when it wrote the following news item: "Infanta Elena was traveling on a train, but not on one of those involved in the accident." Not even Ada Colau would have had an attention-seeking attack like that. The publication ended up deleting the tweet with which it promoted the article and changed the headline to "Alarm for Infanta Elena after the Toledo train accident: her train was not the one involved," which remained absurd enough because it turns out that the King's sister was not even taking the same route where the disaster occurred, but was heading towards Albacete. "Infanta Elena is fine, but shocked by the tragedy," they wrote, once again placing her under the spotlight in an inexplicable way.

In the face of a catastrophe, there used to be a twenty-four-hour grace period during which the news narrative strictly revolved around what had happened, leaving the assigning of responsibilities for after the shock of deaths and injuries had been processed. This is no longer the case, and some digital media outlets were calling for the head of Transport Minister Óscar Puente a few hours after the incident. They did so using dishonorable methods. La Razón and OK Diario asked their readers via respective polls. Of course, 98% of their following demanded his resignation, when it is evident that it will not happen, even less so in the middle of an emergency situation like the current one.

“Ecstasy of Spanish football”, says Marca on its front page, regarding the Ballon d’Or gala. “Kane wins, Spain sweeps”, seconds As, also from Madrid. On the first two pages, the word Barça appears only in the last subheading, when it explains that the blaugranes were chosen as the best women’s team. In Catalonia, of course, the approach had a very different mental framework: “Barça sweeps”, wrote Mundo Deportivo recalling the awards for Alexia Putellas, Lamine Yamal, Vicky López, Cata Coll, Pere Romeu, and the women's team. Smaller, it also recalled the triumph of the Spanish national team, for Luis de la Fuente and Unai Simón, and left the big prize of Harry Kane for the very end. In Sport, the headline was “Blaugrana Party” and all six photographs were of Barça, including a proud Joan Laporta in the last of the cards. L’esportiu, for its part, gives the lead to Putellas, above the headline “Three golds”.

A tweet from the Popular Party ironizes that Pedro Sánchez's latest interviews have been in friendly media (El intermedio, Mañaneros, La revuelta, El País) and that on Sunday he will complete the poker hand on Salvados, also considered a friend. And, on the other hand, they explain that Feijóo visited presumed hostile territory by going to Cadena SER (alas, but without Barceló) and that this weekend he will be interviewed inEl País and La Vanguardia (which are the main printed scaffolds that support the Sanchista narrative today). “The Spain without walls that we defend is also shown with details like these,” they say. All in all, of course, it makes you laugh and highlights how the current era is characterized by the ability of political parties to maintain the narrative with a straight face even when the facts dismantle it.