Julián Quirós: “It is dangerous for power to set itself up as a guardian and say what the truth is”

Julián Quirós participated in the third and last day of the Autumn Conference, which Ricardo Delgado Vizcaíno Foundation organized in Pozoblanco, and which this year have been about the bicentennial of the birth of Juan Valera, about the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado and about misinformation.

In a session in which journalists were also present Alex Grijelmo and Juan Luis Cebrianthe director of ABC wondered if a classic definition of newsthe one that says what someone somewhere doesn’t want published. “And I believe that yes, we should not get carried away by the recent tensions to forget the fundamentals.”

Now there is constant talk of hoaxes in relation to information, and with the suspicion that they come from the press, understood as the professional media, and this is not true: “Hoaxes exist, but they are manufactured outside the professional means, press. They have been manufactured either to weaken them, to communicate different ideas, or to deceive or harass the press. To say that the media does not tell the truth.

Julián Quirós insisted that they are born and function as “a lever designed against the press, but also against society and against democracy». He also admitted that the press can be “extremely imperfect, with less and less time to resolve and respond.”

«Make mistakes exaggerationshas bias and gives it intentionality. It may be more or less rigorous, but the professional press does not consciously invent or plan false facts,” he defended the director of ABC.

He also drew attention to the opinions, which, as he recalled, “are not good. They can be confused or criticizablebut hoaxes are false facts, and not opinions that do not seem acceptable. “If everything is labeled a hoax, it is downplayed.”

Misinformation is a big problem for society, said Julián Quirós, because “it destroys trust, and that is not just a problem for journalists.” With the fast process of digitization has been accentuated, but examples such as the Russian plot of interference in Catalonia or the Bonaire parking lot in the recent DANA in Valencia they are elements foreign to the traditional media system. And yes, “there has always been yellow and sensational press, but it is different from post-truth and contempt for the truth.”

The director of ABC also referred to the plan that the President of the Government announced after his five-day retirement, Pedro Sanchezand which has been revealed as “absolutely inoperative.”

What’s more, he then put forward some reasons and issues about which, according to the head of the Executive, hoaxes have spread, such as the immigrationvaccines and the climate crisis. “All of these are hoaxes that have only been spread on social networks,” concluded Julián Quirós, and that so-called Regeneration Plan “left out those who made those hoaxes.”

«It is dangerous for power to be erected in guardian of truth and say what is true and what is not. In a dictatorship, power can dictate official truth, and in fact by system it determines what is information and what is disinformation. In democracies it is not possible, because the government’s point of view collides with other points of view, regardless of which is closer to the truth,” he asserted.

Censorship risk

For society, admitting that power is the one to say what is true and what is not means giving it those with which there may be a risk of political censorship. When talking about censorship, he cited Miguel Delibeswho in addition to being a writer was director of the newspaper ‘El Norte de Castilla’, with a phrase: “The problem of censorship is not what it takes away, but what it forces to put in.”

The “brutal” change has been brought about by the Internet and the changes it has imposed, which has led to situations that are very difficult to manage. New initiatives have also appeared, “some similar to media and others very different.”

And the result of all this, admitted the director of ABC, is “an important loss of the strength of the media, which is the loss of the monopoly of the intermediation». «Now we are not completely autonomous, because of the brutal emergence of networks and a significant decrease in income. In the press, it is an imbalance in favor of power and to the detriment of the press,” he warned.

The media have lost influence and, in part, control of the agendathe ability to decide what to talk about. What’s more, “power has more and more personnel who work in front of the journalists». «We no longer decide what people should know. Although there are still many things that people do not know and that we tell, there are also things that they think they know that are not true,” he explained.

The press lives under siege. «On one side is Googlewhich distributes 50% of the newspapers’ content. But it is also “a direct competitor, which has monopolized publicity.”

On the other side are social networks, which have kept a good part of the capture of the attention. «They are not means, because they have another logic. They have no editorial precepts and are moved by an algorithm. But one thing is how I see it and another is how I would like it to be and another is how citizens see it,” insisted Julián Quirós, who preferred to call social networks a “channel.”

Many hoaxes can come out of them, but what is more worrying is the toxicity, the harmful content. The director of ABC concluded his speech with a warning: “If the media is not saved, the problem is not with the media, but with democracy as we understand it.”

He had previously intervened Alex Grijelmocolumnist for ‘El País’ and author of books such as ‘The journalist’s style’, who spoke about one of the current problems, which is the proliferation of anonymity on the internet, as a source of problems. It began by remembering one’s own name as a right for children and a source of fundamental information for someone’s identity, and from that point of view, anonymity or the hiding of the name under one that is false, is above all a form of disinformation.

«A name is disinformation when it does not designate a truth, but rather the hidden. “I lie in the way I am naming myself,” said the journalist, who summarized the strategy of concealment on the Internet in a graphic way: “Hands in the light, face in the dark.” There have always been anonymous people, but on the Internet they have a desire to cause harm, precisely because they can protect themselves by not offering their identity.

He gave graphic and real examples: «A ten-year-old child cannot enter a physical store of sexual itemsbut yes on an online one, and even buy them, if you have your parents’ credit card. Every person must identify themselves to send a letter to the editor, but they can write a comment without identifying themselves.

And from there he came to fake reviews of hotel restaurants, or at least unverified ones. The large platforms are dedicated to removing violent or hateful content, often of an extreme nature, but that means that there is also a lot of harassment, which is hidden in the phenomenon of the “aggressor motivated” by anonymity. Self-regulation and limitation can help in the future.

Juan Luis Cebrianfounder of ‘El País’, closed the interventions by speaking above all about post-truth and the fabrication of the story, now crucial. “Now there are many more journalists dedicated to publishing good news and not publishing bad news, than journalists dedicated to investigating to publish bad news,” he said.

For post-truth he gave examples: donald trump and Pedro Sánchez: “If lying is saying the opposite of what you feel, they really believe the lies.” For him, “the biggest inventors of fake news are governments.”