We have a bad reputation, even at the dentist’s office. “Oh, mouths of bad life!” Exclaims the dentist with his headlight on his forehead while he rummages through worn-out teeth from squeezing so much to get the right word out. I remembered that popular adage that begs: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist, she thinks I’m a pianist in a brothel.” Because if the reputation of politicians is bad, that of journalists is devastating. And it validates that idea that it is always better to make the news than to write or read it.

Among the citizens, the profession scares as much as it entertains. “Manipulation”, “massage”, “vomit”… This is how the hot square accuses it of being stirred up by a journalist who seems to act as a messenger of power. Or so they think.

It is true that some pens prefer the pulpit to the pulpit to provide a look outside the topic, and use their loudspeaker to set fire to their sermon. They are the nostalgic, who continue to despise the influence of Twitter and settle in its Greek column, with its base, its shaft and its capital.

The glamor evaporated years ago, along with the prestige and the media. We live in precarious times, even if information is one of the main global entertainment.

In the chain of paradoxes, interviews are usually done by Zoom: it saves, yes, but you can’t smell the character. On the other hand, the windows of opinion makers who sniff the world and its surroundings as if they were reading the tarot are multiplying.

Perhaps because of all this, it was surprising that Yolanda Díaz confessed to Jordi Évole that in a hypothetical Third Republic she would like to have Iñaki Gabilondo as president – ​​she would have shown greater sorority by appointing Julia Otero. A journalist, yes, ideologically significant but with an impeccable professional career. Rigorous, sensible, instructive while entertaining, and a good connoisseur of the human condition. Many raised their hands to their heads and became more monarchical. But what is interesting about Díaz’s example is that, by choosing a figure from a profession so battered, he put on the table the spirit of mediation and the commitment to the truth.

This week I participated in a colloquium at the March Foundation, together with Daniel Gascón, on Spanish articulism. The first thing they asked us was how many times we had been censored. “Never”, we both affirm, fresh and proud, two real examples of freedom of opinion in the bizarre Spanish press. Practitioners of that old craft, that of making articles between politics and poetry that Threshold said, we talked about the necessary plurality of the media and the risk of sentencing. And how there are columns that, instead of illuminating, obscurely obscure.

Before the talk, I reread the ingenious advice of the teacher Paul Johnson to the future good columnist: knowledge (but shown discreetly, without overwhelming), reading in the head, thematic variety without straying from the everyday, instinct for the news. And, although many items are personal, they should never be self-centered.

By way of bonus advice, the bold and very conservative Johnson added: “Life is sad for most people, certainly for the columnist as well. But, as in Pagliacci, it is about not showing it and continuing with the show”. The cascade of news does not stop, just like the mountains of garbage; it ages fast and buries poorly. But, without leaving reality, I tell myself, we will have to aim for the beauty that is hidden and lighten the spine.