Traditional newspapers languish

There was a time when newspaper owners down governments or provoked wars, like the mythical Randolph Hearst, caricatured by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. The ability to generate the print media opinion, and even manipulate, has decreased as it has multiplied the number of existing media. Everywhere, the press called serious, quality, or other similar adjectives, sees declines gradually its sales. It happens to Le Monde in France, and The New York Times, United States. Others barely keep by offering all kinds of beads, from DVDs to concentrated soups envelopes. It turns out that the information has been democratized. Today, anyone can find out what is happening without having to pay a cent for it. Free newspapers, now also hit by the economic crisis happy in a very short time came to capture more than 40 percent of the Spanish market of print.

With them, multiply television and technology advances for easy access. Mobile telephony has become a means of interactive communication and the World Wide Web is already a cyber maze that attach to all types of web pages, portals, computer, internet blogs, ... with the same delight with which hang hams in the drying of ham. The garden of the information thus appears more lush than ever. And above all, more democratic: anyone can say yours today to a mass audience and indiscriminately, without physical boundaries, nor antañonas thought police to prevent it. They are wrong, therefore, those self-styled analysts who speak of monopolies information, using concepts of the last century. Indeed, perhaps Rupert Murdoch holding shift increasingly mainstream media. However, its power to influence public opinion, their status as opinion makers, decreases as extending digital access to communication. You see how little lasting stereotypes based on ignorance or prejudice, much as the authors preach in specialty chairs. The media universe is more democratic today than ever and is poised to be more and more.

So one does not understand the episodic attempts of politicians to put gates to the field and want to legislate criteria journalism from another era. The problem today is not, as we see, the lack of information or democratic in its origin. Today the challenge is to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the melody of sounds, the news of the poisoning. In other words, it is true that we have more information than ever, but at worst we are not more or better informed than before.