The word deny

Words, we know, have a lot of fun with us. They play mocking games, ways of telling us that we will never fully handle them, that they are always smarter. The examples abound, they overwhelm us. There are, without going any further, the words that begin with des. In general they serve to say the opposite of the word they dismantle: undo, for example, and unconvoke, unfreeze, unblock, disillusion… But denying is not doing the opposite of lying; That is to say that someone is lying.

Its origin is obvious: dis + lie —but then the action should be a kind of reflection: I lied and now I deny or I deny, like someone who unsays. And yet no one denies himself: denying is something that is always done to others. To deny is to tell someone that they have lied; It is, as the classics said, “to launch a resounding lie” against some other person's statement.

And we don't do it enough. We live in a world that cares a lot about fake news —which, if we weren't so cheesy, would be called fake news. It seems as if they had appeared now – with social networks and the immediate rat-like multiplication of discourse – and yet, in that world without networks there was fake news as influential as that of a large New York newspaper that claimed that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and justified with that invention a major invasion, or that of a Spanish Prime Minister who proclaimed that the perpetrators of the worst attack were Basques from ETA and tried to justify his re-election with that. The re-election failed, the invasion was a disaster that is still ongoing, but we do not always remember that its origin was that fake news.

We live, then, in that world that “discovered” fake news not long ago, and does not do much to deny it. I am not referring to that kind of nonsense that Saxons and Saxonists call fuck checking, that paranoia that makes certain media, which employ journalists they do not trust, use another cheaper journalist to confirm if what the first one wrote about the smell of petunias in Vladivostok is absolutely unquestionable. I like him so much fuck checking which I have proposed that it be extended to all professions: that, for example, when one surgeon finishes operating, another one reopens the patient to make sure that the first one has not left a gauze or an artery loose.

So here we don't talk about fuck checking but about something very different: denying falsifications. And it is curious that the media that tear their clothes so much in front of them do not make their covers with them nor do they have a systematic and precise method to denounce them. A minor example: now there is, in Buenos Aires, a president who repeats in every speech that “130 years ago Argentina was the first world power.” It is false, flatly false. But the media reproduces it with a casualness that should embarrass them—instead of pointing out, every time he says it, that it's not true and explaining why. Or, without going that far: in Spain there are two or three parties and many thousands of people who chatter and mobilize to “avoid the dictatorship.” [de Pedro Sánchez]”. And, every time someone with weight or a few thousand says it, the media reproduces it as if it were possible, instead of explaining what a dictatorship is, what it does, what it prevents, how it works, how it represses—taking examples, say, of own history—and why that does not and cannot happen today in Spain.

I say: in our media no one denies anything. And one of the main functions of journalism should be that: to deny. Detect the lie, disarm it. If they do not do so, they resign themselves to being the spokespersons or loudspeakers for an idiot or a forger, always under the pretext of portraying reality. But they actually portray a subject who tries to falsify reality; If they are not able to reveal it, we will have to ask ourselves what the hell they are for. Question that, with a certain logic, more and more people in the world are asking: less and less believe in newspapers, in journalism.

It seems silly but I insist: one way to regain some credibility would be to have a daily section that would bring together all the lies and half-truths that flood the public debate and dismantle them with very precise data and explanations. And that, when publishing notes where someone tells those lies, he would underline them in red or blue so that the reader knew that, if they click on them, they will reach that section where the falsification is unmasked, debunked. Or something like that, I don't know: something that makes us feel like we're good for something, not just to complain that we live in a world full of fake news And what a pity, we who are so good and no one notices.

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