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Abstract
Through the analysis of Spanish media coverage of the terrorist attack in Madrid 11 March 2004, and specifically of the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ sustained by certain media for political or commercial reasons with large public success, this article examines the consolidation in Spain of a kind of journalism that tries to model with Lewis Coser's concept of ‘greedy institution’. The political functions of this ‘greedy journalism’ and its relationship with the so-called ‘neo-populist turn’ of present politics in Western democracies are discussed in brief.
Acknowledgement
Translation by Susana López Penedo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Notes
1. Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Euskadi and freedom), Basque terrorist group founded in 1959.
2. For example see Gil Calvo Citation2005.
3. We base this on ‘Historia de una conspiración’, the extraordinary report published by the Catalonia Journalists Association in their newsletter Capçalera; see Avilés Farré 2007, Rovira Citation2007. We have also based this on the report published by El País with the title ‘La fabricación del bulo sobre el 11-M’; see Romero Citation2007a, Citation2007b .
4. See ‘Rinconete y Cortadillo’ in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares.
5. The PP leader, Mariano Rajoy, declared the same day of the elections that he was ‘morally convinced’ that the terrorist attack had been committed by ETA. After the court sentence, the main party leaders – with the notable exception of former president José María Aznar, who on 11 March itself personally called the editors of the main Spanish media to inform them that he had unequivocal evidence that proved that ETA was responsible for the attacks – have admitted that the Basque terrorist group had nothing to do with the events.
6. Of course the mistakes by El Mundo, Telemadrid and COPE were not the only ones connected with the case. The day after the terrorist attack, for example, the radio station SER informed the public that the police had found in the trains the rest of the bodies of suicidal terrorists. The news was immediately rebutted by a police spokesperson and the radio station admitted the mistake and apologised.
7. It is not the first time that El Mundo has been involved in supposed payments to people in order to get statements. Another witness of little trustworthiness, the former police officer José Amedo, whose statements revealed the GAL state terrorism scandal during Felipe González's governments, revealed in his memoirs that he received 30 million pesetas from Pedro J. Ramírez for his revelations (see Mercado Citation2006). Of course, the editor has always denied such payments.
8. Boric acid (H3BO3) comes from the borax that is used as a non-irritating antiseptic (for instance for eye diseases) and in the pottery industry, the production of fire-resistant textiles and for steel hardening. Of course, it has no use for terrorist attacks, unless they are against microbes. Nevertheless one of the censored experts, Isabel López, supported the conspiracy thesis in El Mundo with the following argument: ‘How is it possible, I wonder, that El Haski had cockroaches and her feet stank, and the ETA ones had cockroaches as well and their feet stank?’ El País revealed in 2007 that in 40 years of fighting against ETA a police investigation had never found boric acid related to explosives (Romero Citation2007b).
9. The report said literally: ‘No objective elements have been found that allow one to link both terrorist organisations’. See Romero Citation2007a.
10. This documentary was signed by José Antonio Ovies, news deputy editor of Telemadrid.
11. In February 2008 José Antonio Zarzalejos was dismissed as ABC editor, due to the fall in sales of the daily. Since then he has denounced the pressure from Esperanza Aguirre to follow the conspiracy theory (Rovira Citation2008).
12. This has not happened only in the case of Spain. A survey done in 2006 by Pew Research Centre revealed that more than half of the Indonesian, Egyptian, Turkish, Jordanian and British Muslims thought that the 11 September World Trade Center terrorist attacks were not perpetrated by Muslims. Two years before, another survey had shown that nearly half of New Yorkers believed that the US Government had previous information about the criminal plot (see Avilés Farré 2007, p. 30).