“Democracy itself is at risk” – El País' hypocrisy exposed

On Monday morning while I was having breakfast it occurred to me to check what the Spanish press was saying about Barça's victory in the Super Cup. I almost choked on my sloe jam on toast when a strident El País editorial jumped out of the screen. “Europe must react” the headline shouted, almost hysterically. Alarmed, I began to read the opinion of this authorized mouthpiece of the Spanish ruling class. Where did this panic come from and what was the response that El País demanded?

The central argument of the editorial is that “Europe is facing a political offensive led by Elon Musk.” The magnates of technology companies, El País warns us, “use their platforms to influence European politics, spread disinformation and promote the agenda of the extreme right.” The threat is serious, according to the newspaper since “technopopulism puts democracy itself at risk”. Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

Let's start at the beginning. There is no doubt that Elon Musk has launched a political offensive in Europe, attacking, in turn, Starmer, Scholz and Macron. He has also used the platform provided by the social network that he owns, X, to promote reactionary demagogues such as Farage in Great Britain and the AfD in Germany.

However, one might think that these activities are within the limits of bourgeois liberalism and the freedom of expression that is supposedly one of its pillars. It seems not. El País demands “a stronger reaction from the EU to safeguard its digital sovereignty” to “stop disinformation and protect the citizens of the Union.” In other words, the EU must protect itself from opinions it does not like through laws that allow censorship… in the name of democracy and freedom of expression! You could not make it up.

What is the objection here? That Musk has a lot of money? El Pais reminds us that he’s “the richest man in the world”. But isn’t all of the media controlled by the superrich? El País, to give an example, is owned by the PRISA group. The PRISA group is one of the largest Spanish media groups, controlling newspapers such as El País, AS, Cinco Días, El HuffPost, in addition to being the leader in radio broadcasting in Spain (Cadena SER, Los 40), in Colombia (Caracol, W Radio) and Chile (ADN), in addition to having a presence in ten other countries. Prisa is also the owner of the educational publishing house Santillana, with a presence in 20 countries. X is, of course, one of the largest social networks in the world, but El País is not exactly a local newspaper in a small town.

And who controls the PRISA group? The main shareholder of PRISA, with almost 30 percent of the shares, is the investment fund Amber Capital, owned by billionaire Joseph Oughourlian, who also owns several football clubs. The second largest shareholder of PRISA is the French business group Vivendi, with 11 percent of the shares.

Scratching the surface a little, what we find is that under capitalism all the major media groups, whether ‘traditional’ (radio, TV, newspapers), or social networks (Meta, X, Telegram, etc.), are owned by large capitalist companies or billionaires. Together they have almost total control over access to information by ordinary citizens. Each one of these groups has a certain political point of view, El País included. They all defend the capitalist system, but each with their own political slant. In this respect, Elon Musk and his X platform are not different from other media companies.

But perhaps what really bothers El País is that these “techno-populist” billionaires spread disinformation? Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. All the bourgeois media participate in the dissemination of disinformation, and the newspaper El País is no exception. The capitalist media everywhere lies about the real reasons for the war in Ukraine and what is really happening in Gaza. It justified the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Serbia, etc.

El País has been deliberately lying about Venezuela for more than 20 years. It is not only that it has a political point of view regarding Venezuela – one that ultimately reflects the interests of Spanish multinationals – but that it lies blatantly in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of that point of view, a Spanish imperialist point of view.

To give just one example, in 2019, when Guaidó attempted to proclaim himself president of Venezuela without having been elected, El País stated in its editorial that “the regime has exposed its most miserable face by burning some trucks loaded with medicines and food” in regard to an incident on the border with Colombia. This happened to be completely false. Later on, El País was forced to publish an errata in which it acknowledged that “these events never occurred.” This is a textbook example of disinformation, and by El País, no less.

So, what are the El País protesting about? Perhaps it is the fact that these US billionaires have launched “a political offensive” against Europe. How dare they interfere in the politics of another country! Ah, but it turns out that the millionaire owners of El País have done precisely the same thing, that is, they have launched a political offensive against Trump in the US. You only need to read the editorials of El País to realize that the newspaper actively campaigned against Trump during the US elections, presenting his possible victory in the most apocalyptic terms possible and advocating for a Harris victory as the only way to “save the system.”

Thus, it is the height of hypocrisy on the part of El País to complain that Musk resorts to disinformation, and that he interferes in European affairs, when this very newspaper is guilty of the same.

The real situation of press freedom under capitalism was summed up very well by Lenin / Image: public domain

The real situation of press freedom under capitalism was summed up very well by Lenin more than 100 years ago:

“The publication of a newspaper is a big and profitable capitalist undertaking in which the rich invest millions upon millions of rubles. ‘Freedom of the press’ in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor.

“This is the simple, generally known, obvious truth which everyone sees and realises but which ‘almost everyone’ ‘bashfully’ passes over in silence, timidly evades.” (‘On freedom of the press’ from How to Guarantee the Success of the Constituent Assembly, September 28, 1917)

And later, in a decree of the Soviet government, he added:

“For the bourgeoisie, freedom of the press meant freedom for the rich to publish and for the capitalists to control the newspapers, a practice which in all countries, including even the freest, produced a corrupt press.” (Draft Resolution On Freedom Of The Press, November 4, 1917)

El País’ editorial also contains a pathetic and impotent call to the European bourgeoisie “to promote the growth of local companies and prioritise the use of European technologies.” In reality, in the current international landscape, Europe represents a collection of second rate and declining imperialist powers with disparate interests, which are scared because Trump is threatening to withdraw the protection that American imperialism has traditionally provided them under the umbrella of NATO. And there is not much they can do in response, despite El País' alarmist calls.

Faced with the outrage of the “techno-populist magnates” attack on Europe, the flagship newspaper of progressivism and democracy in Spain demands that the EU “apply severe measures against platforms that violate community rules.” That is, in the name of defending democracy and freedom of expression... it demands the censorship of those opinions that it deems ‘dangerous’.

This is a pretty serious matter. Let's be clear. Any regulations that capitalist states create with the excuse of combating disinformation or extremism, which they use today to supposedly combat the extreme right, will also be used tomorrow to combat opinions that they consider dangerous by those of us who oppose the capitalist system. You don't have to look far to confirm this. Measures of this type have already been used in Spain and beyond its borders to repress freedom of expression.

You just have to look at one of the examples that El País gives of the kind of measures it demands: Romania. There, the victory of an anti-establishment candidate (a reactionary demagogue) in the first round of the presidential elections led to a howl of protests by the EU and finally to the cancellation of said elections by the Constitutional Court, with the excuse that “foreign interference” had occurred through a campaign on TikTok.

Thus, in the name of a threat "to democracy itself", El País demands that Europe "abandon passivity" and "adopt severe measures", such as... the cancellation of elections if the favorite candidate of the progressive newspaper par excellence does not win. Herein lies the essence of El País's “progressiveness”.

Let's be clear. Trump and Musk are reactionaries opposed to the interests of the working class. But that does not make them in any way worse than Biden, Harris and Starmer, who represent the interests of the imperialist, capitalist establishment that arms, finances and supports the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Zionist state of Israel. Oh yes, but they do it by cynically covering themselves with the loincloth of inclusivity, diversity and equity.

Trump and Musk are reactionaries opposed to the interests of the working class / Image: public domain

Disinformation and manipulation are rampant on social media. In that, social media is not very different from the ‘respectable’ bourgeois media – the one that sold us the story that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” the one that raised a chorus of hypocritical protest against the violation of Ukraine's sovereign borders while justifying Israel's invasion of Lebanon as “legitimate defense”.

No, in reality all the media lie and manipulate, sometimes openly, at other times slyly or by disguise, with the aim of defending the interests of their capitalist owners.

That is why the working class needs its own media. That is why revolutionary communists must have their own newspapers and publications, whose political independence is guaranteed because they are financed only by the contributions of their readers and sympathisers.

Genuine freedom of the press and freedom of expression will only be guaranteed when the working class takes power and expropriates the media to put them at the service of the majority. As the program of the Russian Communist Party explained in 1919, after the seizure of power:

"Bourgeois democracy confined itself to the formal extension of political rights and liberties, such as the right of assembly, right of association, and freedom of the press, to all citizens alike. But in reality, administrative practice, and above all the economic enslavement of the toilers under bourgeois democracy, has always rendered it impossible for the toilers to make any wide use of these rights and liberties.

"On the contrary, proletarian democracy, instead of formally claiming rights and liberties, actually grants them primarily and mainly to those classes of the population which have been oppressed by capitalism, namely the proletariat and the peasantry. For this purpose the Soviet government expropriates the bourgeoisie from buildings, printing plants, paper stores, etc., and places them at the complete disposal of the workers and of their organizations.

"The task of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is to draw ever wider masses of the toiling population into the enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties and to widen the material possibilities for this." (1919 programme of the Russian Communist Party)

Here we would only have to add to “printing presses and paper warehouses”, servers and social networks. True freedom of the press and freedom of expression can only be guaranteed through the abolition of the regime of private property. Meanwhile, it is our duty to unmask the disgusting hypocrisy of progressives and liberals who howl in favor of censorship and the suspension of elections … all in the name of the ‘defense of democracy’.