Be careful with this column, it burns. I just said no to a tempting interview with a red carpet celebrity for the back cover of this newspaper, and I write these lines with blood boiling from rage and the euphoria of someone who loses a battle hoping not to lose the war definitively. Naturally, the offer to interview the aforementioned deity was not selfless. The lady was contractually promoting her participation in a series with the usual media deployment of global platforms: a marathon of interviews in a super-luxury hotel with a stopwatch and photos controlled by her legion of assistants. A perversion of the profession called junket that we all go through in one way or another, where we all pretend that this is the interview of our lives, while, no matter how much goodwill the parties put in, we all go home with the crumbs from someone tired of answering the same questions for hours and the condition to mention whatever sells in what we publish. Okay.
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None of us are free of guilt. We have been bending over backwards for too long in that kind of pact where the character gets publicity for their product and the journalist, content for their audience. But this time, moreover, the interviewee demanded to choose the photo to publish with the interview from all those taken by photojournalist Bernardo Pérez, a professional who on May 4th, along with EL PAÍS, celebrates 50 years photographing the world and before whose lens have posed from Indira Gandhi to Gorbachev passing through Clinton, and from Bette Davis to Jack Nicholson passing through Isabelle Huppert without putting a foot wrong. That was when I jumped, got dignified, and told them no, thank you, that we were not going that way, knowing that others would go that way, and wherever necessary, and I would be left alone with my outburst of pride and without my counter.
Look, I am neither a heroine nor a martyr. If I said no to the insecure star, it is because I can say it from the privilege of having worked for decades in a medium that, far from punishing me, allows it. Others either cannot, or do not want to, or neither, and keep swallowing. And let it be clear that there are no innocents here: our problem, everyone’s, started when we swallowed Rajoy’s plasma, Vox’s veto on non-supportive journalists, Pedro Sánchez’s appearances without questions, and, recently, Rosalía’s no to photojournalists at her concerts. Enough already, right? Okay, journalists are not the news, but without journalists, and photojournalists are as much journalists as writers, there is no journalism, only public relations. So, either we stand our ground or we are dead, colleagues. By the way, I could reveal the name of the presumptuous star, but I keep respect for others’ work that so many have lost on their way to stardom.
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