Due to curious family circumstances, I watch many current political programs on television; Due to less curious circumstances, I read political news in various media. And I’m always amazed at what our press considers “politics.”
There is no need to go into etymologies: we all know that the word politics comes from πόλις, copcity in Greek, and which designates the management and treatment of citizen issues. Here, however, and in many other places, much of the media has fallen into the trap of believing that politics is what politicians do.
This seems logical, and yet no one would say that meat is the butchers’ job: they just buy it, store it, sell it and earn a few euros. But if we wanted to know what is happening with meat, we would have to know how it is raised, who the small shepherds and the big breeders are, how they got their land, why they choose each breed, how they buy and sell, how they feed their cows, what medicines they drug them with, how they decide to kill them and how they kill them, how much should be consumed, what are the risks, how much journalists pay to neutralize vegetarians. But no: we’re talking about the butchers, their weekend offers, their rigged scales, their knives.
Politics, of course, is not what politicians do, those boys and girls who didn’t know what to do with their lives. With the gods reduced to a secondary role, politics is the tool we have left to try to improve the way we live. We are now trying to adopt a system of delegation – citizens vote so that other citizens speak and decide for us – and separation of formal powers – occupied by the citizens we elect. It is obvious that their power is relative: big businessmen, gentlemen, have much more. And large crowds would do it too if they decided to exercise it.
But we, journalists, always talk about them, the so-called “politicians”. It’s not strange that we do this, nor is it occasional. We continue to obey what we were taught: that journalism should speak to people with some power; that they make the news and that the rest, all of us, may be their backdrop – unless we make the effort to die in multiples. And in politics, it seems – seems – obvious that those who have the power are the politicians: only because we give it to them, only because we allow ourselves to.
If that’s what matters, that’s what matters. At the moment, “political journalism” in Spain is divided into two large zones: the zone of corruption, always so juicy and sticky, so good at making us feel honest by contrast and safe in our morals, and the zone of ex-justice, always so dark and so redone, so good for fighting. to infinity in Latin and various zarandajas, so useful to the true powers in exercising their power. In between – unfair trials and glimpses of thefts – hours are spent on television, pages on the laptop screen, the competition for the most contagious insult. And it seems that it is not worth trying to tell us who we are, how we are, what we do, what they do to us, the reality that politicians usually hide in their speeches.
Seriously: it seems that we are not interested in informing ourselves and informing ourselves about all these things that are the subject of politicians’ politics. Define which ones they are, which ones are important and work on them. If the problem of housing is on everyone’s lips, it is worth, in addition to saying what it does in these mouths, to study and say where its lack comes from, how it is formed, to whom and how its concentration benefits, to the lives of those who suffer from it. If Madrid is the scene of a brutal attack on public health – our great common heritage – it is important to explain in detail its problems, which companies want to maintain this “market”, how they do it, what this means for citizens, how the administration harms public health for the benefit of private health and, of course, the lives of those who suffer from it. And so on: problems of education, work, immigration, inequalities, various violence.
In short: saying what politicians say on these issues is not journalism; Journalism would be about tracking and analyzing these issues. Because this way we can better understand our lives, our options, our decisions. And if journalism doesn’t do that, it’s useless.
With forgiveness, more was missing and the respect they were due.
About The Author
