The news about the start of the new tour of Bruce Springsteen in Barcelona last Friday, with the assistance of Barack and Michelle Obama and Steven Spielberg and his a, was last weekend among the most interesting they generated It was reported where they stayed, which places they visited, where they ate and, of course, their vibrant concerts at the Olympic Stadium.
Some readers and subscribers have written to me about an error in the chronicle of the first concert. Despite the fact that at the beginning of the article it was correctly stated that Springsteen began his concert with a “Hola Barcelona! Hello Catalonia!”, in the fifth paragraph it was stated that in the middle of the performance he proclaimed: “Catalonia, Spain, we love you!”. But, at that moment what he really said was: “Catalonia! Barcelona! We love you!”.
Some of the readers believed that the inclusion of Spain was not an accidental mistake but an intentional one. “They have manipulated Bruce’s words”, wrote Joan Esmel, who believed that “this is not an innocent mistake”. Emilia Francia expressed herself in a similar way: “Lying affects the credibility of the newspaper. I hope to see what measures they take to be able to continue to believe in their impartiality”. Mercè Trullén pointed out that “the videos bear witness to what was really said”. The subscriber Marcel Salellas congratulated the author of the information, Sergi Lozano, for reflecting the “many emotions in a significant concert and an experience that for many will have been unforgettable”, but also pointed out that he found it “very strange the reference to Spain” and asked if it was “just a mistake, the gnomes of the printers”, or a “conscious insertion”.
Lozano, with a long career at the newspaper and who before joining the Culture section demonstrated great reliability at the head of the closing of the printed edition, makes it clear that it was not intentional. “To make the chronicle I was waiting for the songs or, for example, for when Michelle Obama went on stage… At the moment when Springsteen said those words, I was pointing to something else and I understood what he was saying Catalonia, Spain. I was wrong and I’m sorry. We corrected it in the morning in the digital edition and the next day there was a faith of errors in the paperâ€.
The management of the newspaper, for its part, accepts Lozano’s explanation – it considers it obvious that there was no intention to manipulate – and maintains full confidence in his professionalism.
Readers are right that the error is not minor: they must be able to trust that if we attribute a literal sentence to a person, that sentence was indeed uttered. But mistakes happen. And once committed, you can only correct and apologize.
