We are behaving like greedy assholes. A greasy and abusive big guy has arrived in town and we are willing to do anything to collect, like a pearl, every last burp that comes out of his mouth. We are not doing journalism, but becoming comparsas of a despicable snitch. All he has to do is move a finger to have a dozen microphones in front of him picking up everything he can think of – accusations, gossip, entanglements, innuendos, doubts, babbling nonsense – or whatever he has written in his hustler script with the aim of agree or renegotiate your procedural situation with the prosecutor or with the judge. Yesterday this individual stood up in the extraordinary plenary session of the Council of Tenerife to put on another miserable and rude act and we came quick, like flies to shit, and the show turned out great. Navarro Tacoronte sat there to fix his wrathful gaze on the president of the corporation, Pedro Martín, and two hours later, as he left the plenary hall, brand him a fake. Do you know what I think? That this gibbon should have been prevented from entering. Or if it is detected once already inside, expel it immediately. But the president didn’t even have the courage for that. Yes, to the street instantly. Whether illegalities or irregularities have been committed in the insular government in the last three and a half years remains to be seen and decided in court. But that Navarro Tacoronte tried to corrupt — at least — a high official of the Tenerife Council is confirmed by a witness: Navarro Tacoronte himself. It is incomprehensible that a public institution would tolerate that a subject who confesses that he tried hard to worm her open the door for any type of act. Let’s see if we’re forgetting that the corrupter is just as disgusting as the corrupted. Both are corrupt. Both deserve the same rejection and the same moral condemnation.
None of this, of course, disavows the veracity of all, many, or few of Navarro Tacoronte’s claims. Unfortunately, whistleblowers do not usually have an impeccable resume, rather the opposite. A decent person, precisely because he was, could not release what Navarro Tacoronte is releasing. But we should all assume that the place where this guy should speak is the court. Otherwise we will be practicing complicity as stupid as it is toxic. We will be wasting the truth and the truth is a public good that journalists, professionally, must protect. Without truth we are absolutely nothing. Without truth, this is not a trade, but a decliningly profitable phantasmagoria or a crepitation of egomania in the flesh. Without the truth we do not deserve any respect. Navarro Tacoronte is not a source of information, but must be the object of it. It deserves to pay attention to it, but not to give it away. Perhaps pick up his version and point to him, but not become obedient typists of his vomitous slapstick.
Worse still: in this frenzy of moral stupidity and political opportunism we are losing some healthy habits. I remember that decades ago a journalist from El Mundo phoned me: he wanted to talk to me about Adán Martín’s activities as an arms dealer in a sub-Saharan republic. I laughed and told him to go to hell. Now, on the other hand, I see press officers having coffee with Javier Negre in the center of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. And they weren’t exactly alone. That old mechanism – with a far-right pamphleteer, a lie is fabricated, published and then the very scandalized manufacturers spread it as the truth – has not used to have much experience here. But everything changes. And not for the better. Everything goes dark and journalism shrinks like a crumpled ball of paper in the shadows that someone out of focus picks up and throws into the trash can.
