(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Pseudoperiodismo y pseudodemocracia)

Many scenes are deeply shameful in Spain today. Every day we are served images that look like set-ups designed to humiliate and embarrass Spaniards. Starting with any appearance by the President of the Congress, Francina Armengol. But one that ought to generate, besides shame, a great deal of horror is without doubt one that has been repeated, in which we see in the Parliament’s press room a young journalist ask a question of a government official. Or of that grotesque figure, unfortunately representative of his kind, who is Pachi López. And immediately afterward we see the majority of colleagues get up after hearing the questioned politician hurl some disqualification, insult or impertinence at the journalist who asked the question.

All as one, they obey the dictate of the politician who declares the press conference closed with the act of contempt toward a colleague whom none of the other journalists support or stand by. When the last question, that of the scorned one, being the most uncomfortable, is always the most pertinent of all. Before this scene, and for probably half an hour, one after another the journalists have asked the questions the politician expected and that they brought on assignment, and some will have helped the member of the government to place his message better on his preferred terms.

Now the government “asks for protection” from the Press Associations so that they shield the executive from what it calls “pseudo-media.” To be clear, “pseudo-media” are the ones that have those solitary journalists who ask the questions that are not welcome. There was a time when it was understood that true journalism was to publish what power did not want published. Today the journalism of the majority is to publish what power dictates so that the company can know it will receive its slice of the public-money pie to pay the staff and allow itself some indulgence. But it is also to denounce, accuse and harass the colleagues who still hold that concept of journalism, which is to ask power what it does not want to hear and to expose everything power wants to hide.

Thus official journalism has already gone, after many years of being a flock of parrots repeating what their masters say, to being a gang of informers for power who help it in the repression, in the reprisals and the threats against those journalists who have not sunk as low as they have, and against those political forces that are neither power nor a consented and controlled opposition.

With honor abolished, there are television programs in which people compete to be the most snitching, groveling and villainous in demanding total submission to the government’s messages. If this is always a baseness and an infamy, it is even more so when practiced as informers and accomplices of a coup-plotting government allied with all kinds of forces hostile to democracy and to the nation. The acts of indignity multiply. There are the associations that were created to protect journalists against power, scolding journalists on power’s orders.

The Association of Parliamentary Journalists, which is the Association of Parodists of Journalists of a parliament that, for the rest, no longer exists in its democratic sense, recently gave proof of the abysmal degeneration I am referring to at an event that defines the regime, its parrots and also its lackeys. There they gave an award, for being likable, to a woman who not so long ago used a newspaper to tell the murderers where the shots should go. And the shots went there. But who remembers today the dead that the Pachi-Lopezes buried in the mornings after having been at cozy dinners in farmhouses negotiating peace deals between fish and steaks with those who were killing them?

These gangs, which are more and more the mop-wielding hacks of a government that lives solely and exclusively off and for the lie, the abuse and fiscal plunder, increasingly recall that Association of Soviet Writers that Mikhail Bulgakov so wonderfully described in “The Master and Margarita.” It is not only in Spain that we now have a press turned into cheap servitude, with some exceptions such as this newspaper, which has the independence of its solvency and allows me to publish this reflection.

In Germany, all the national media that once had reputation, dignity and a commitment to the truth are humiliating themselves by turning a pseudo-item from an obscure outlet about a private meeting of right-wing people, including some member of the AfD, an informal gathering to exchange opinions where someone had a somewhat heated comment about how to combat immigration, into a terrifying conspiracy that they compared to nothing less than the Wannsee Conference, no less, at which the Nazi leadership decided the extermination of European Jews. They spoke of deportations, something the French

Macron and German politicians in general have done. But here it is a monstrous conspiracy according to the entire press. This is not merely trivializing monstrosities. It is one more proof that European social democracy, under whatever initials — because in Poland it is under a President Donald Tusk — who belongs to the European PP group, is in full offensive to have the whole press subdued and to close the cracks that might allow alternative messages to emerge. And the truth, which is what they fear most.. And if the media do not submit, they are physically stormed, as happened in Warsaw a few weeks ago.

It is about leaving no opening for the truth, because the unified and seamless message must be that of the struggle against those truly national and conservative forces — not of electoral pretense — which in every European country grow in vitality by the day. And ahead of the June 9 elections, panic is spreading in many capitals and now nothing shames them anymore. In Spain the government asks the press associations to armor-plate its messages against some intrepid journalist eager to know the truth.

In Poland the new government that came to power thanks to the massive interference of Brussels and Berlin and the agitation of the German-owned media, which the naïve members of the previous Polish government failed to combat or counter, is trying to criminalize the conservatives who governed for eight years with much success and little public relations or media skill. And everyone, as in Germany, invents the return of Nazism or fascism, when what they have in front of them are societies fed up with lies, with failures and with an ideology that makes them ever less free and more poor. And it organizes within the national-conservative parties to confront and thwart the plans in Davos that aim to turn Europeans into subjects of a socialist mega-state with the same rights as the Chinese and the same Chinese controls, because it is cheaper and does less harm to the planet.

These plans, which a few years ago they believed were already fully on track and without any opposition, are beginning to crack because of the massive resistance in the nations that are becoming aware of the threat and are willing to make it fail. And for that, the essential thing is to stop listening to the snitch journalists and to attend to the questions of the marginalized.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.