"Unusual", "grotesque", "disconcerting". These are some of the adjectives the media have chosen to define Florentino Pérez's press conference this Tuesday, a meeting full of reproaches with which he announced the call for elections for Real Madrid. The president of the white club and candidate for re-election shot against everyone and everything, and singled out media outlets and journalists by name and surname, whom he accused of waging war against him. Hours later, the first covers of newspapers and written and radio editorials reacting to his words were published.

The logic of news imminences functions like a strobe light (that device that generates intermittent light, causing very curious optical illusions): what today occupies all the headlines may disappear tomorrow without anything really having changed. The Gaza conflict displaced that of Ukraine, the escalation with Iran repositioned the devastation of Gaza, a health crisis as striking and cinematic as that of hantavirus is irremediably covering up the Ormuz mess. Etcetera. The mechanism is not accidental. It responds to a media ecology based on competition for attention, a finite resource that is distributed according to criteria of emotional impact and novelty. Also of narrative saturation. When a topic stops generating surprise or no longer offers any immediate and appetizing dramatic twist, like that of the viral ship, it falls into the background even if its objective gravity is equal to or greater than others. A girl bites a dog and contracts rabies, but the next day Larry, the popular cat of Downing Street, scratches the leader of the British opposition and the case of the biting and rabid girl is forgotten all of a sudden. These are examples of insubstantial but well-seasoned events.This volatility creates an intermittent reality, where facts do not disappear from the world but from the narrative. Ukraine continues to be a conflict that totally conditions international relations, but its media presence fluctuates according to the irruption of other (supposed) emergencies. Gaza continues to suffer a horrible humanitarian crisis, but the coverage is diluted when another geopolitical focus erupts with more force. And so it goes. Public perception is therefore built on a regime of discontinuity, where importance does not depend so much on the magnitude of the event, but on its ability to impose itself in the incessant cycle of novelties through a non-logic of an emotional or even aesthetic character.The phenomenon is not new. During the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis completely overshadowed the Algerian War, even though the conflict accumulated hundreds of thousands of deaths. The 1994 Rwandan genocide (relative to the total population, one of the worst in history) was invisibilized because it coincided with the toughest moments of the Balkan War, a war closer and easier to codify culturally and emotionally. The 2010 Haiti earthquake disappeared from the headlines in a few weeks, replaced by the eruption of the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which affected European flights and, therefore, generated a more direct sense of urgency. Even 9/11 swiftly displaced the coverage of the 2001 Argentine crisis, which until then occupied a central space on the international agenda. It stopped being talked about, period. Since it did not fit the official apocalyptic narrative, not a single syllable was said about the behavior of world stock markets, which reacted with indifference to Bin Laden's attacks.

When you do a Google search related to a current event, it's common for the search engine to highlight a series of news related to what you're looking for. Google chooses which news and which media outlets it highlights according to its own algorithm, and until now there was no way to choose which media it promoted more and which ones it didn't. But this has changed: now the user can choose which media outlets they want to be highlighted more. They do this through the "Source preferences" option, which until recently was only available in English in the United States and which now works in Spanish.

Since she was 15 years old, Xantal Llavina (1975) has been clear that she wants to be a journalist, but with a family of entrepreneurs, she opted to graduate in journalism and business: "I'm a humanities person and accounting was a bit complicated for me. In fact, I begged the teacher to average my grades with the theoretical exams because I would never be an accountant, only a journalist. A year later, when I was already on television, I ran into the teacher and she told me that I was right, that I wanted to be a journalist," she explains. Restless and hardworking, Llavina has ended up building a career that goes far beyond journalism.

The Spanish government has approved the draft bill that will regulate state-funded advertising in the media, establishing a limit of 35% of the net annual revenue of the media outlet or the group to which it belongs. According to the government, this new legislation aims to "prevent the economic survival of media outlets from depending on public funds." The new regulations affect traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio, as well as digital platforms. The draft bill falls under the purview of the Ministry of Public Administration and Digital Transformation, headed by Óscar López (PSOE), who stated at a press conference on Tuesday that "public sector advertising plays an essential role in informing citizens, but it cannot be a means of buying media outlets." According to 2024 data, the advertising market in Spain is worth €13 billion, of which €2.7 billion is allocated to state-funded advertising.

"Silvia Orriols: the xenophobe who hates Spain and is sweeping the pollsWith this suggestive headline, La Sexta announced the report it aired last week about the leader of Aliança Catalana. It is not the first interview she has given to a Spanish media outlet. Other media outlets, some with a pro-Spanish stance, such as OK Daily and Global ChronicleShe has also been interviewed in recent months, always responding in Catalan. But the interest is not new.

With the same headline, What do the French really talk about?, earlier this year the magazine Marianne published a dossier. The assumption was that there is a great distance between the facts reported in newspapers and the facts discussed at the bar. The weekly compared the front-page headlines of six major French newspapers with the conversations discreetly overheard by thirteen journalists located in thirteen bars across the thirteen French metropolitan regions. This is not a scientific pretense, but following Honoré de Balzac's assumption that the bar of a café is the Parliament of the people.

This August 8th, the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) came into force.

In recent months, something has changed in the way we read without us even realizing it. And I say "read" and not "search for information on the internet" because I don't know a single writer or artist, even those in their seventies surrounded by a venerably analog aura, who doesn't log on to the internet every day to see how the world is doing. And it turns out the world is increasingly empty of people and more filled with stochastic parrots. "Stochastic parrot" is the nickname we use to try to diminish the authority and propaganda that dominates the great language models of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT: "parrot" because they regurgitate the work of others and are only capable of repeating what someone has already said; "stochastic" because the mechanism that makes these models guilty of what these things are is not a process of logical reasoning, but one of chance artificially introduced into the choice of words. But, although this robotic parrotism is perfectly familiar to us and we instinctively despise it, we use it. For a few months now, newspaper traffic has been plummeting because we're asking ChatGPT for things we used to ask publications written by human writers. There's a bubble of inhuman readings that we should burst.

As sensitive as we are to the misinformation caused by fake news, we are at the same time extremely tolerant of the systematic publication of white lies intended to make us agree with the political agenda of those who fabricated them and the media outlet where they are published. I think of all these studies, investigations, interviews, and reports used to create a biased representation of reality to make it more complacent and less conflictive, or to make it more threatening and provoke a more forceful response in favor of how we would like it to be.

Trump's new term, the results of the German elections and Meta's decision to dispense with fact-checkers on its networks These are just three examples of how 2025 is immersed in hate speech and the rise of the far right, a trend that has been brewing for years. The role that journalism plays in this context is one of the issues that the new Media.cat Yearbook, published this Tuesday. The report, published since 2011 by the Ramon Barnils Group of Journalists, compiles analyses and reports that address issues such as misinformation during coverage of the DANA (National Action Plan for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), censorship, the precariousness of the profession—which particularly affects younger generations—and the lack of diversity in newsrooms.