Let me tell a personal story. On Wednesday, February 19, 2009, he began in what was then called Project 40, the program All Staff, led by a server and by my partner Bibiana Belsasso, who over the years also became my life partner.
We celebrated 14 years on the air yesterday. It was not a desirable alternative at the time: on television combining politics and security, opinion and research in the same space they said that it was not advisable, they did not want to contaminate one thing with the other: security was seen as a red note, and it was not finished understand that few things are as political and impact society as much as insecurity and that the actions of organized crime must be analyzed as that of a group of political, social, and economic power. That from a journalistic point of view, violence, insecurity, and organized crime must be put in context and backed up with hard information to break the fabric of rumors, gossip, and sensationalism that is built around them.
we started in all staff with a 15-minute program every Wednesday. Shortly after we were there two days a week, and soon after, they were, as we continue to be, a space of half an hour a day, from Monday to Friday, for years at 11 at night. And we have done it with enormous editorial freedom. At the beginning we had the almost unconditional support of Luis Armando Melgar, then director of the channel, support that continues to this day with Luciano Pascoe, already at the time of ADN40, and that is endorsed every day by Ricardo and Benjamín Salinas. For all of them and many more, there is nothing left but to be grateful for the daily support and backing in times, those and these, in which it is very complex to do this type of journalism independently, based on hard data, maintaining the true objectivity that It is based on reflection, giving an opinion with the best information and using the fewest adjectives possible.
Investigation and opinion are the axis of current journalism. Faced with the alternative truth and misinformation, investigating, giving an opinion, trying to establish that rare objectivity that allows one to demonstrate based on hard information, is what differentiates journalism from social networks and occasional propagandists, from those who daily try to caricature and denigrate journalists and media.
None of the leading journalists in this country are just newsreaders. Anyone who has not reported is not a journalist. To conduct news, radio or television, certain skills are required, but very different ones are needed to report, which is what we journalists do, to build news spaces, to investigate and give an opinion with certainty: no You can have a reliable vision without being in the places, without talking to people, without knowing what you are reporting, in the same way that you cannot have a credible image in the electronic media without knowing how to write, without knowing how to put into Of course, on paper, ideas, data, impressions and convictions, only in this way is there clarity on the screen, on the radio or on the networks. You can be right or wrong, you can have errors of appreciation, but not of information, the data must be hard, they must be verified, they must be transmitted clearly, that is the axis of this profession.
The challenge is to show what is important and make it interesting, to compete with information, data and opinions against misinformation and alternate truths that they want to impose on us and with which they bombard us every day.
That is something that we have been trying to do, for 14 years, in Todo Personal, throughout three administrations as different as those of Felipe Calderón, Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. They have been years of alternation and pluralism, which has progressively turned into polarization and hardening. Many politicians and officials have been in heaven and have fallen into the hell of power in these 14 years, the country has changed, the number of deaths and violence has continued to grow relentlessly, we have gone through a war between cartels, a pandemic , a series of political hurricanes and innumerable scandals, media and companies have been born and have gone bankrupt, we have gone through Obama, Trump and Biden, we have been able to see with our own eyes and show it to you, the decadence, the deterioration that we have experienced in the social fabric . And also shown characters that we should be socially proud of.
Kapuscinski said that “to practice journalism, above all, you have to be good human beings. Bad people cannot be good journalists. If you are a good person, you can try to understand others, their intentions, their faith, their interests, their difficulties, their tragedies”. And it is true, but it must be complemented with what our Francisco Zarco said: “Do not write like journalist what you can’t sustain as a man”. That’s what it’s all about, that’s what we’ve tried to do during these 14 years and we’ll continue doing in the future with Bibiana in Todo Personal. And of course, as we’ve been doing since we were very young, in other media since 1989, and in Excelsior, in these Reasons since 2006. It is simply about doing journalism.
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