The detector of toxic media matter

Spain is breaking apart; the government has sold out to ETA; (Prime Minister) Zapatero is the most inept among all the world's inept, (his Socialist successor) Rubalcaba is evil; the Church is being doggedly persecuted; the crisis is terrible; the unions are worse... This is the rosary of apocalyptic thoughts voiced by more or less extreme rightwing columnists when the Socialists are in power and the Popular Party (PP) is in the opposition.

The EL PAÍS cartoonist Peridis expressed it in one of his vignettes back in 1985: "Ana doesn't love me and it's the Socialists' fault."

Now, a meticulous compendium of these and other notions is available in Las mil frases más feroces de la derecha de la caverna (or, The 1,000 most ferocious phrases by the reactionary right), compiled by José María Izquierdo. Izquierdo, a seasoned journalist who has worked as deputy editor of EL PAÍS and news editor at the television stations Cuatro and CNN+, presented his book on Monday at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes, where frontline members of the audience included the Socialist candidate to the November 20 elections, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, and the current defense minister, Carme Chacón.

Although the book contains a selection of 1,000 furious paragraphs originally published in the newspapers El Mundo, Abc, La Razón and La Gaceta, or heard on radio and television stations of similar ideology, it would be inaccurate to call it an anthology. It is not a compendium of bouquets and garlands (that is what anthology means in ancient Greek) but a digest of ferocious or slanderous statements. Here are two examples: "Zapatero plans to legalize polygamy" (Luis María Ansón. El Mundo, 13-01-2011). "We're going to get pissed on but we have to say it's raining" (Alfonso Rojo, El gato al agua. Intereconomía TV, 29-06-2011).

As George Orwell said, if freedom is good for anything it is to tell the powerful what they do not want to hear, and Izquierdo proves it every day in his blog El ojo izquierdo (The left eye), available in the digital edition of EL PAÍS, and on SER radio station, where he summarizes and analyzes the "pearls" of the day. The journalist Iñaki Gabilondo, who wrote the foreword to the book, called this task "the detection and indexation of toxic matter."

"The ferocity of some columnists at these mastheads, some of them centenarian [the Abc], the insults, the lies and the distortion are incompatible with the rigor expected of a news outlet to make the decency grade," states Izquierdo. "With them, arguing is impossible. They do not debate, they insult. They do not argue, they intimidate."