One of the functions of journalism is to establish an order of priorities of the news. Historically, the press set information priorities from the front page and the different sections organized reality with a criterion that, for decades, marked our perception of the world.
Television and radio adapted this model until the internet and digital editions modified the way of compartmentalizing the present. Now the user’s freedom to jump from one content to another is enhanced with ease –Tarzan’s lianas– that no longer depends so much on a hierarchy of transcendence as on an à la carte supply of dopamine.
An offer that, in the name of immediacy, can mix a controversy about a model’s abs, the eruption of Etna, the latest gruesome detail about the dismemberment of Edwin Arrieta or gems like Joanjo Pallàs’ articles on swimming pools.
All that comes to the story of today, August 17. The news is the constitution of Congress. Thanks to the histrionic secrecy of the negotiations and the hysteria of the countdown, the date has acquired the dimension of a reality show (the only thing missing is for the negotiators to reach Congress by jumping from a helicopter), with a speculative charge that will be part of an outcome that it will not be as in extremis as they would like.
After the post-electoral truce, the parties voraciously claim the media prominence that they tend to squander so much. At the same time, however, is the commemoration of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils.
Six years later, it is no longer possible to talk about them mechanically or in an excessively emotional tone. And it is always surprising that the promises of commitment to the victims fade.
There are precedents: since the massacres at Hipercor or the Vic barracks, the will to remember barbarism with civic dignity has to combat the inertia of oblivion, the fallacy according to which time heals everything and the indecency of instrumentalization. Whatever happens today in Congress with the maneuvers and haggling in the bazaar, hopefully a space of memory of the attacks of August 17, 2017 will be preserved. A useful memory, which flees from the minute of silence understood as a formality or, worse Still, like a nuisance.
