The visit of the authorities to Paiporta has caused an outburst of anger among the group of people who were waiting for the procession. The kings of Spain, Pedro Sánchez and Carlos Mazón have been greeted with insults and cries of ““Murderers! Murderers!”mud and objects were thrown at them and official cars were attacked. La Sexta covered it live and, despite the poor quality of the images, the events were clearly identified. When we had spent a quarter of an hour watching those scenes of violence and chaos narrated by the presenter of the special program, they connected live with Antonio García Ferreras through a video call, as if it were an emergency. The director of information and publishing of the chain considered that this required his presence. Many media stars think they are indispensable, as if their colleagues can’t take on the job. At first, the presenter devoted herself to interviewing García Ferreras so that he could speculate on the facts, as if he had the absolute truth: “Do you think that if the king and queen had gone without Mazón and Pedro Sánchez this would have happened?“. The story was about protecting the crown. García Ferreras started a pro-anarchic speech: “The kings have received collateral damage from the other leaders”, “The king has lived up to what he represents” and emphasized his “tremendous bravery“. When García Ferreras broke in from his house, the images were no longer live but delayed. They put them on a loop. For more than an hour, the director of La Sexta editorialized them with a demagogic speech that justified the violence and even sweetened it: “Today we have witnessed the indignation of mud and hopelessness“, he repeated. He built a story full of populist emotionalism, with empty rhetoric. He valued the facts with a cheeky sufficiency, filling his incessant verbiage with adjectives. It perpetuated the conflict by repeating the images, creating a sense of directness, recreating itself in the praise of the monarch for having stopped to talk to the people. In the informative of the two, García Ferreras continued as the narrator of the images, with his subjective account, convinced that those scenes should only be managed by him. His reiterative speech was increasing in emotional intensity, as if it were a rally in slow motion. More than explaining, Ferreras cursed to attribute new meaning to what we were seeing.
García Ferreras turned an outburst of anger into hyperatrophied drama. With his words he ignited and polarized the context more. Intoxicated by the power of television, he seduced and speculated and acted as a law enforcement officer. This excess of ego leads certain characters in journalism to believe that they are the managers of reality. And this leads to two consequences: the clear distortion of the facts – of which relevant aspects have yet to be clarified – and the suspicion that, behind that exaggerated need to control the interpretation of the facts, there are hidden interests concrete
Mònica Planas Callol is a journalist and television critic
