Pilar Rahola on media selectivity and the myths of the public narrative

This conversation with Pilar Rahola, Catalan journalist and war correspondent in Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Balkans and the Gulf, who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Russian Parliament and Baltic independence, addresses the mechanics of the contemporary public narrative: how attention is selected, how myths are installed, how the word that whitewashes operates, and how terror reproduces itself as a totalitarian ideology.

The interviewee’s opinions are her own; the Conversations section does not imply doctrinal agreement.

The selectivity of attention

It is not true that people grieve for every war. They grieve only for the wars they are shown on television. The one who decides which war interests you and which war does not is not the ordinary citizen but the media outlet, or the public narrative.

The war in Yemen has been terrible and cruel. It has lasted years. The estimate so far is around 400,000 dead, and I have never seen it on television. The war in Syria we had at our gates: people fled trying to enter Europe and, in Europe, we told them no. We watched them die trying to reach us and to leave their country, and I never saw a single demonstration.

The world is full of conflicts. But the narrative selects. There is no narrative about the victim, only a narrative about the presumed culprit.

The three myths of the public narrative

There are three installed myths that hinder any objective analysis.

The first myth is the inversion of the universal victim. An ideological current that ran out of heroes replaces the old fighters against capitalism with a new universal victim. Before, it was the worker, the guerrilla. Now the cause changes, but the structure remains: someone has to be the absolute oppressed, someone has to be the absolute oppressor. The world is reduced to a simple dichotomy that denies all nuance.

The second myth is semantic. The press chooses words. It does not speak of terrorists: it speaks of militiamen, of guerrillas. The double standard operates on a violence that kills civilians in Las Ramblas, in London, in Buenos Aires, in Bali. It recognizes terror when it happens at home. It renames it when it happens far away. The word whitewashes.

The third myth is categorial. What is a totalitarian ideological project is presented as a territorial cause. When a deputy prime minister repeats a slogan without understanding what it means, she is not defending a people: she is defending a catchphrase. The vast majority of those who speak know nothing, but they believe they know everything.

The global microscope

There is a disproportion few people measure. A people of fifteen million, and eight billion talking about them. From the mountains of Nepal to any village in Africa or Southeast Asia, everyone knows that this people exists. They do not know the Catalans exist. They do not know that any people anywhere in Africa exists. But they know the Jews exist.

And now that we have social media, those eight billion have an immediate channel of transmission. The disproportion is not new. The speed is.

Cancel culture

They have imposed a set of concepts and denied us the debate. They have fixed a sentence and eliminated the possibility of discussing it. If you defend something different, you are no longer someone to debate with: you too are an accomplice. They cancel you. They single you out.

In the air of public debate there are no longer two opposing positions: there is a canonical position and a proscribed one. The conversation is neither won nor lost. It is forbidden.

Education for life or education for death

The difference between an education for life and an education for death is not rhetorical. It is the difference between humanity and the denial of the future.

When a child should be adoring his childhood idols and ends up idolizing those who die killing, that is not a cultural choice. That is deliberate engineering. Terror needs the next generation to inherit terror. Without that transmission, terror dies out. That is why terror educates.

Terror as totalitarian ideology

For those who use their religion, their nation, their race or their cause to destroy everything: there is no god, there is no race. There is only evil.

Communism used a cause, social justice, and massacred millions. Nazism used the cause of the Aryan and destroyed its own nation. Radical Islamism uses God and destroys its own people.

Different ideas. Different motives. Different circumstances. But the same ideology: terror. Totalitarian ideology. Nothing more.

Truth in war zones

I have been in war zones. When you are in a war zone, you cannot trust any source. Because in a war, truth disappears.

And yet the international press applies an asymmetric criterion: when a piece of information comes from one side, it presents it in quotation marks, as doubt. When it comes from the other, it copies it as a headline. That asymmetry is not journalism. It is a prior position disguised as coverage.

The closing

In spite of everything, there is a core the narrative does not destroy. People, in the end, want to live. The mothers who mourn their children would want a situation in which their children did not become terrorists. Life is always stronger than death.

It is not a consolation. It is an observation. As long as that core remains, the narrative can be dismantled.