The Oscar winner Christopher Nolan, when he was still making sophisticated heist films and had not insisted on revealing the meaning of life and reconnaissance morality, made one of the most entertaining films about the assault on a safe, a treasure that was locked deep in a man’s psyche: Inception (2010). His parable was the most eloquent cinematographic expression of a rarely expressed certainty: that there are dreams within dreams and therefore leaving one of them does not guarantee returning to reality. Anyone who tends to have nightmares like having had a heavy dinner before an important commitment knows this: in sleep, one dreams over and over again that he wakes up and overcomes the challenge that awaits and consumes him.
But the truth is that he is still sleeping and the false awakening is just another trick of the nightmare. Freddy Krueger already used this trick in the Nightmare on Elm Street series without much embellishment. That is the exact point in which Spanish journalism finds itself twenty years after 11-M. Mired in a successive nightmare and dreaming of waking up, but trapped in the web of not knowing how.
If for institutional purposes, the 2007 trial closed the story forever and for political purposes it was definitively resolved in the 2008 elections that reaffirmed the 2004 result, in the journalistic field we are still in that same place. Prisoners of that cursed hour in which lies – and not errors – became common currency. Despite the fact that each of the lies spread about the investigation was denied or collapsed on its own due to the stall’s own nastiness, no one asked for forgiveness, no one resigned from their responsibilities, no one was fired or expelled from the job for lying and almost everyone The participants in that gigantic hoax have seen their careers progress significantly since then.
The debatable argument that these were “journalistic errors” could be used as a raincoat, to be generous, for the first 48 hours after the attacks, especially given the well-known and ultimately useless direct pressure from the president in office, José María Aznar. , to the main media. But it cannot at all cover the falsification of evidence and the paid testimonies that followed the defeat of PP and that occupied Madrid’s front pages and gatherings for months and that are still in force twenty years later. In The Call (Debate), the director of El País at the time, Jesús Ceberio, gives an account of, indeed, the calls – from the Secretary of State for Communication, Alfredo Timermans and from President Aznar – that led him to change the headline “Terrorist massacre in Madrid” for “ETA Massacre in Madrid” for the afternoon edition. He says that he immediately received the angry call from the group’s CEO, Juan Luis Cebrián, and that in response to his explanation, that the President of the Government had told him so, Cebrián replied: “Well, he has deceived you.” And he hung up.
José Antonio Martínez Soler, then general director of the most widely distributed free news program in Spain, 20 Minutos, recalls how from the first minute outside Spain no specialized source supported the ETA hypothesis. “You die of shame when you think that Aznar tried to deceive the UN.” It alludes to the United Nations declaration of condemnation in which Spain maneuvered for ETA to appear.
Sometimes, in journalism, a certain distance from sources and facts operates as a balm of common sense. The late economist Manuel Portela, an hour before Arnaldo Otegi denied ETA’s responsibility that same morning, wrote in a private message addressed to a journalist: “ETA is a Leninist organization, how the hell is it going to commit a massacre against the line of Cercanías that comes from Pozo del Tío Raimundo, being able to do so on the one that comes down from El Escorial through Collado Villalba? It’s very weird”.
So strange that it was clamorous. The southeast, the most depressed area of ??the Madrid region, in front of the A-6 route, the A Coruña highway, where the most expensive second homes in the community are concentrated. And the main fiefdoms of the political Franco regime, by the way. Terrorist organizations are political artifacts, and although the method is crime, the driving force is ideological and the objective is always political. With his reasonable message, Portela prevented his confidant from joining the glaring mistake that hours later some of the most respected journalists in this country would commit.
The PP failed to force the fall of the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, despite becoming the parliamentary speaker for all the slander published and broadcast during its first term, and the 2008 elections, where Zapatero once again prevailed over Mariano Rajoy, ratified the opinion of the voters on the matter. In 2008, Rajoy had already broken with the PP faction that promoted as true the fabulous conspiracy hypothesis, defended politically by Esperanza Aguirre and with José María Aznar pulling the strings. Pedro Jota Ramírez and Federico Jiménez Losantos, from the paper and the waves, were the main bishops of the hoax campaign and the archbishop of Madrid, Antonio María Rouco Varela, the sorcerer who bewitched the journalistic ammunition of the headlines of El with his blessings. Mundo, which was echoed by COPE, episcopal radio, and the Telemadrid network, which, after the departure of Alberto Ruiz Gallardón from the presidency of the community, who became mayor, had been intervened by Aguirre’s forces. Telemadrid had seen the independence it had enjoyed for years disappear, an autonomy that had made it one of the most respected and influential regional channels in the country and one of the largest audiences.
If Gallardón and Rajoy were the first political victims – after their defeat in 2008, Aguirre and Ramírez tried to force their resignation without success –, in journalism one of the first casualties was José Antonio Zarzalejos, who as director of ABC refused to support from its head the joint campaign of Ramírez, Losantos, Rouco and Aguirre, as narrated, in delightful detail, in his book La destitución (Planeta de Libros), an illuminating volume with an eloquent subtitle: “History of an impossible journalism.” The journalist Gumersindo Lafuente, in charge of the web version of El Mundo, escaped from reproducing the most crude and flagrant lies on digital, and also ended up jumping into the air.
But none of them were the main victims, since this role was left to the victims, embodied in the 11-M Association Affected by Terrorism, chaired by Pilar Manjón. The battle against Manjón reached such an extreme that the right managed to establish an alternative association, although it barely represented a handful of victims, compared to the thousands that Asociación 11-M still represents today.
In the recently published Voices of 11-M (Víctimas de la lie) (Editorial Planeta) the journalist and professor of Political Communication at the Rey Juan Carlos University, Víctor Sampedro Blanco, collects the heartbreaking testimony of Manjón and his successor at the head of the association, Eulogio Paz, among others, for the re-victimization that the infamous campaigns against them entailed, particularly violent in the case of Jiménez Losantos’ broadcasts about Manjón, who had to have a bodyguard for eight years. Until the PP won the elections in 2011 and the Interior immediately withdrew its protection.
Both during the investigation commission and during the trial, an unexpected battering ram in defense of the conspiracy invented by the press was the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT), used as the PP’s fifth columnist to try to silence the association that brought together the true victims of 11-M (a task to which the AVT continues to devote itself, as is evident on each anniversary of the attacks). The AVT achieved, for example, that the victims of 11-M were relegated compared to those of ETA, preventing them from collecting their compensation under the protection of the Anti-Terrorist Law, so that many of the victims’ relatives were left without compensation, explains Manjón. in Sampedro’s book.
The AVT criticized the ruling that resolved the case, but did not even appeal it. Eulogio Paz, Manjón’s successor in the 11.M Association, recalls in the same volume that among the newspapers that supported the PP, not only the ABC, but also La Razón ended up abandoning the flat-earther bandwagon over time, given the weight of the evidence. .
After the terrible attacks of 9/11 in 2001 in New York and Washington, the trauma in American society was of such magnitude that the media without exception closed ranks with the president of the country, George Bush Jr. They accepted without much hesitation the reduction of civil and political rights that the Patriot Act entailed and supported the White House when it knowingly lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion of Iraq. However, years later, practically all of the relevant newspapers and networks apologized to their audiences for having trusted the government to the point of neglecting the required professional rigor when disseminating this information.
Nothing similar has happened in our country. To a large extent, because the sin of the American media was to unthinkingly align itself with the authorities in defense of the country’s interests, while, after 11-M, the objective of the lies was to force the fall of the socialist government and rebuild posterity. by José María Aznar, and the lies did not come from the authorities but rather their fabrication was a work of the media themselves. The sin of Spanish journalism is not similar in origin, purposes or resolution to the dissemination of government lies that The New York Times or The Washington Post made after the 2001 attacks and therefore there was never an examination of conscience, pain of sins, purpose of amendment, confession, much less any penance.
The last infamy of the 192 deaths of 11-M was the journalistic scoundrel issued from Madrid during the following years that has left the profession mired in a state of ethical bankruptcy in which true facts and responsible journalism are quoted with the same value as the shameless inventions and tendentious twists of reality. Nor has self-control done anything to abandon the nightmare. Not only have the union organizations not voiced the mea culpa nor has there been any intention of self-regulation or development of a stricter code of ethics, but the Madrid Press Association, the most powerful of those in the capital, ended up choosing as president in 2015 to Victoria Prego, who was the deputy director of the political area of ??El Mundo at the time of the attacks and remained in office until June 2015. As a columnist she was one of the most enthusiastic defenders of the conspiracy theory and the fabulous serial stories from your newspaper.
All the protagonists, except those who have reached retirement, are still active. In a way, we are all still there. In that same place, in a nightmare within another nightmare, struggling to get out of a spider web that made reality debatable. Flat Earthism, climate denialism and the anti-vaccine movement dwell in that empire of suspicion. The Origin spinning top is still spinning on the table.