The world that some in the media still don’t get
Spanish publishing company RBA, which owns the weekly satirical comic magazine El Jueves (The Thursday) has forced the publication to change this week’s cover, which featured a caricature of King Juan Carlos handing a crown filled with excrement and buzzing with flies to his son Prince Felipe, accompanied by the headline: “The King abdicates”. As a result, the magazine has to delay its appearance in newsstands by a day, withdraw and destroy an entire print run, and then reprint and redistribute a new edition with the cover that was planned prior to the announcement on Monday of King Juan Carlos’ standing down in favor of his son. RBA’s decision, which forbids the magazine from ever including the royal family on its cover again (there have been a number of less-than-flattering depictions in recent years), has prompted El Jueves’ editor to resign, along with Manel Fontdevila, who drew the offending cartoon, and several other contributors.
The magazine has a print run of 80,000, and sales of around half that figure. A few hours after the story broke in a Catalan daily newspaper, it was on the social aggregation site Menéame, which soon translated the original from Catalan into Spanish, sending more than 7,000 readers the newspaper’s way. A few hours later television presenter Risto Mejide published the cover on his Twitter account, which has more than 1.7 million followers. By the end of Thursday, it had been retweeted almost 2,000 times, and was 700 people’s favorite.
This is the reality of a society that so many in the Spanish media still do not understand: in the last century, only those with access to a printing press or a broadcasting license could hope to reach so many people. Control was a relatively simple matter, and it was still a plausible prospect to censor a publication or program. But in this century, a tweet by a well-known figure reaches a far greater number of people than any daily newspaper’s print edition, and the idea of preventing information from circulating freely is simply laughable. And as this example once again illustrates, trying to do so usually has the opposite effect of that intended: the so-called Streisand Effect, that has its own article in Wikipedia since 2003 and constitutes a subject of study in universities and business schools all over the world.
RBA’s decision backfired spectacularly: we don’t know if it came under pressure from the royal household, or if it decided on self-censorship just in case. But aside from damaging its own reputation, it made sure that the very cover it wanted to hide was seen by more people than the publication’s modest print run could ever hope for. We’re talking STUPID here.
We live in a time when anybody who believes that just because an issue is kept out of the official media it means it doesn’t exist is hopelessly out of time. Believing that you are going to create a more malleable news environment by bribing or pressuring the mainstream media is a hopeless approach, as is trying to censor the rest of us who might have something to say.
(En español, aquí)
