Journalists

I think journalists are a funny species. At least Spanish journalists are. In Spain we are sadly used to mistranslated English numerals, for instance. There aren't “seis billones de seres humanos” in this planet, for god's sake. And if Spain's GDP amounted to as many “billones de euros” as some Spanish journalists believe, we would be by far the largest economy in the world. They lazily adopt foreign words and expressions in a horrible way. “Remover un obstáculo” will never help solving anything — actually it would be rather difficult to do unless such obstacle was made up of mud. In Spanish, the demonym “americano” covers all inhabitants of Patagonia as well as all Americans (we specifically have “estadounidense” for those), so there are no “Américas” for us. But many journalists even display an astonishing ignorance of the rules of their own language. If some prize has been awarded 42 times before now, the current award is not “la cuarenta y tres edición”, but “la cuadragésima tercera”. And what to say about their coverage of science and technology news? I think British media are more rigorous, but in Spain many journalists still call the WWW “el ciberespacio”. I know some folks who spend more time within the internet than out of it, and they almost never use that word. For some Spanish journalists, anything that remotely sounds computerish is always “virtual”, “multimedia” and “interactivo”. As if all that was not enough, sometimes it seems that they don't even ponder the meaning of what they write. This evening I read on the electronic edition of “El país” this headline:

“Ryanair ofrecerá en 2008 un viaje a la Luna de bajo coste”

My first thought was that Ryanair might be planning to start flying sub-orbital some day. It sounded odd, but still feasible. But when I went on reading the body, the news were that Ryanair was about to have such space flight as soon as next year! No need to read more; I assumed that April fools' day had soaked once more in the media of countries that don't recognize the significance of that day. One hour later I come back to find that “El país” has edited the article prepending some apologies, but not mentioning that they were victims of a prank! In fact they link to the item by Europa press and to Ryanair's news release itself, as if saying “they told us; it's not our fault”. But reality is you only need to read the latter to detect the joke flashing before your eyes: “[…] By 2020, Ryanair Orbital aims to make the moon as attractive a holiday destination as Alicante or Málaga. […] Reach for the stars from just 1c (one-way excludes taxes and charges)”. “El país” is no unreliable e-zine, but probably the most important newspaper of record in Spain. Although sometimes it lacks a good proofreader.