Today, the kiosk offers us new proof of the truth that the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, according to which the channel through which a content reaches us modifies the meaning of the same content. Two very similar headlines mean two different things, and that’s how the respective readers decode it. The first is that of the newspaper The Countrywhich opens the front page with “The Supreme Court prosecutes for the first time an Attorney General of the State”. The accent is placed on the exceptionality of the measure and, written in a newspaper affiliated with the PSOE, it suggests that the Supreme Court is in a politicized drift, to the point that it is not cut when it comes to putting the staple on an executive which he perceives as hostile. The second headline also underlines the unprecedented nature of the measure, but it carries it The reason: “Indicted for the first time a general prosecutor, who refuses to resign”. Here, on the other hand, what we want to generate is indignation: how big the attorney general must have made it, if they ended up charging him. The line “that refuses to resign” adds a fatal slab of guilt, non-existent in Prisa’s newspaper.
The Supreme Court can fight the political battles it wants, because it knows that its interventions will be conveniently covered by the Brunete press. We’ve seen it before: a similar headline, but opposite meanings. That’s why, when the semantics are so flawed and the connotations already come from the factory, sometimes it’s the images that can collect the state of it all with cruelest precision. I was thinking about it when I saw the magnificent cover ofThe Jump which this article illustrates. “The empire of soldier-judges,” reads the headline. And you can see two hands with single fists – the lace of the magistrates’ mittens – and, on the skin, a telltale tattoo of the very far-right Burgundy cross; and in case there were doubts, an American fist on the phalanges to apply the lex tattooed on the knots. It is that of the image and the words, which comes from long before McLuhan.
