Hard Work and Little Return. The Newspaper Baron's Lot.

 

It’s been a hard year for newspapers. Copy-sales are down, advertising is down and, with the Covid, both of these doleful situations are even worse. No one wants to buy a newspaper; no one wants to advertise in one. In the past year, sales of newspapers have fallen by 29% says the Asociación de Medios de Información. Advertising revenue is 75% down on ten years ago. The hope has been the digital editions, with pop-ups, click-bait and maybe a paywall… But, there’s always another news-service at the click of a mouse that's without them… 

The other tactic is to fire journalists, or pull back on real news or expenses or satellite offices and try and fill the paper with agency or promotional material which, of course, the reader doesn’t want. ElDiario.es says ‘…The printed newspaper is running out of time, publishers are reluctant to see it and that can cost them the flames of the paper house fire spreading to the digital town-house on which they propose to live…’. However, as Wolf Street says, most of the cyber-advertising these days goes to just two companies: ‘…The internet has changed the power structure of advertising, with Google and Facebook getting most of the spoils. This shift has been going on for years and has upended the newspaper publishing industry – long before Covid-19…’. 

Business over Tapas - no advertising, no hard-selling. Subscriptions here.  Facebook here.

 

Fake News and How to Control it

Fake News. Bad, right? The Government thinks so and is introducing rules to stop the media from posting fake or manipulated items by setting up a permanent commission against la disinformación  -  (as they prefer to call it). The commission, says El Español here, is purely PSOE-controlled and without the presence of Podemos (a regular victim of bulos).

These journalistic inventions, as we know, are often used to create anger, disdain or hopelessness in the readers or viewers - for political or economic gain. They are not to be confused with slanted reportage, or even propaganda (using selective facts for manipulative purposes), which happens the whole time, depending on the politics of the media in question. We are talking here about purposely-produced lies.

The current debate is of course whether this is a righteous struggle against these items of hoax news, or simply government censorship (with all the sinister connotations which that supposes).

Some news-services currently use 'fake news' without any particular limit - OKDiario is one of at least a dozen notorious examples. Their recent editorial on the subject at hand says ‘Now it will be Little Franco Sánchez who decides which news is true and which is fake’.

Many more bulos are found in the Social Media (although both Facebook and Twitter have recently taken to some form of ‘fact-checking’ claims published on their platforms).

A local English-language free-sheet famously fired off a hoax news-story last August based on fake interviews with Government ministers. Indeed, it made the pages of Spain’s leading fact-checker here. The point being that fabricated stories like this can cause unnecessary alarm amongst the public.

Fake news is a recognised problem in Brussels, but the EU's strategy against disinformation is ‘aimed towards Russia and China, not as a surveillance of the national media’ (here). Indeed, the official opinion from the European Commission on Spain’s, ah, putative control of fake news is “Any initiative in the field of disinformation must always respect legal certainty and freedom of the press and expression. But we have no reason to think that this has not happened in the case of Spain”.

Maldito Bulo here (the Spanish version of Snopes) is more or less on board with this ‘ambiguous rule’ (yet of the opinion that independent sources – like Maldito Bulo and others – should be the ones to monitor the news and social media), but the press is not at all happy. The AMI (the national association of newspapers) is quoted here as saying 'You can't take away our freedom of expression').

The leader of Vox doesn't like it either: 'The Tyrant Sánchez introduces Censorship', writes Santiago Abascal in a characteristic tweet. Slightly more alarmingly, the Spanish Secret service CNI is also against introducing institutional controls against fake news (for professional reasons, we wonder?).

In short, it is one thing to monitor fake news, but it’s quite another thing to seek to stop it. Maybe the threat of fines coupled with disclosure might help cool the jets of the wily fabulists.

 

My Two Cents

 

We are asked to dine early by the restaurants to escape the curfew. We should be ‘more like the northern Europeans’ and change our habits for an early dinner.

It is our duty and responsibility, in short, to save the restaurants and bars from the current crisis.

Programmes on the TV show the plight of various industries. The flower sellers aren’t selling flowers; the tour-buses are going broke; the museums are all but empty and the open-air market people have lots of over-ripe fruit and no one to sell them to.

But all this is no one’s fault, or if it is, then it’s the fault of the politicians not daring to be stricter with the populace.

It’s probably fair to say that we are more likely to catch the coronavirus in a bus or a bus-station, an underground train or an airport. But, whether it’s a restaurant, a tour-bus or a cinema (who wouldn’t take his mask off in the dark?); you can count me out for the time being.