The documentary ‘7291’ is not a documentary. Before an audiovisual product, the viewer establishes a previous and inalienable pact with the director: I will believe you. We will have a lot … Five asleep with the crazy tangles of a comedy or to throw a very rich head if it is a film-ensay. If what is offered to us is a documentary, if we are told that this is the genre in which the work is framed, we will assume that what we are preparing to see is an exercise of approach to the truth, rigorous and informed, which will contemplate in all its amplitude the versions offered in respect of the chosen theme and that, with data and arguments, in the light of the tests, it will discard some to conclude that others are more accurate.
If not, if what the director offers us is only his own and interested vision, if it is a request for a orchestrated principle to corroborate the departure thesis itself, without questioning or contrasting it, without also contemplating those other circumstances, facts or data that do not agree, nor the arguments that refute it, before what we are is before a propaganda exercise. And if instead of telling us that it is about that, or the very personal point of view of the director, if they insist on continuing to call it “documentary”, that is intellectual dishonesty, when not directly deceived. That this is also done from public television and giving its premiere treatment of the subject of state, issuing it simultaneously in La2 and in the 24 -hour channel, the thing acquires dimensions of instrumentalization of a tragedy and use of a public service for spurious purposes. Because the more than one million people who, on average, saw yesterday ‘7291’, sat at the TV to watch a documentary and sneaked into a multirreport. And for all those citizens, the murky management of the Covid-19 pandemic was reduced to a local phenomenon outside the central government and 112,709 dead do not count. What lucky to be an old man outside Madrid. What a bad ayuso. And it seems very good to me that Juanjo Castro tells, in the format he deems appropriate, his particular vision of an unusual event, it was only missing. Top well with his creative freedom, expression and thought. And no half problem there would be if they had also been issued, complementing their own, other similar products that expand their gaze. But when you choose to go with everything red in a single version, as if the others do not exist, when it is legitimized that this is the only true, not because it is demonstrated but because only that is shown, and is done under the protection of the probity that we presuppose (or we would like to presuppose) to a public television, that is worrisome.
A public television cannot be instrumentalized in such a disappointment, or without dissimulation at the service of the partisan interests of the person who holds (and held the power at that time). It is improper of a democracy and very dangerous for it. A public television, with a vocation of service, must be useful for the citizen and must be plural, and should be rably rigorous, independent and neutral. But, when everyone’s television is only useful for the government, it is no longer plural, rigorous, independent and neutral. Or it ceases to be all that precisely to be useful. And in that we are. But do not tell us, then, that RTVE is a public service. And do not tell us that ‘7291’ is a documentary.
#Rebeca #Argudo #RTVE #public #service #documentary
