When we decided to launch El Nacional we did so with the firm intention of helping Catalan society, if the majority believed that the time had come to take a leap forward from autonomy to sovereignty, as had been demonstrated in the elections, to have a medium that identified with this new reality. Not the only one, obviously, but being well aware that in a Catalan media map controlled by unionism, where news stories are established many kilometres away and where the biased and often fake story bombardment is very difficult to avoid, there would never be enough of us to reverse this everyday reality.
With this objective, we set out on March 6th, 2016. Four years later, the Catalonia that we have is different in many ways, starting with the repression imposed on the pro-independence movement, which has forced into exile members of the Catalan Government dismissed by Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, while Catalan ministers and social leaders are serving long sentences in Catalan prisons and hundreds of people are facing different legal cases with a common thread: their belonging in the Catalan pro-independence milieu. Numerous violations of rights and freedoms have been committed and, on the occasions where the courts of justice or the Spanish Central Electoral Commission have not reached, the Spanish state has appealed to the Spanish Court of Accounts in order to add more suffering: the economic ruin of many politicians that has only been avoided through the solidarity fund.
Despite all this, and in extremely difficult circumstances, which have put the resilience of Catalan society to the test, the cause of freedom and democracy continues to be supported by a majority of our fellow citizens - the right to be able to decide freely, through a referendum, the future of Catalonia. There are no steps backwards in this objective in spite of all the discussions, many of them irrelevant, in which Catalan pro-independence parties get involved.
El Nacional has established itself as the country's newspaper of record, and all audience measurements undoubtedly consider it the leader among digital natives in Catalonia and also in Catalan language. If we take into account the digital newspapers in Spain, including those that also have paper editions, the ranking of visits in Catalonia according to ComScore is headed by La Vanguardia followed by El Nacional, ahead of such historical newspapers as El País, El Periódico or El Mundo, to name a few.
These are very good results, unthinkable when we started out, which make us be very aware of what our readers expect from us. And to correct mistakes when we have made them. But these figures are still insufficient to have the necessary strength to bring down the often manipulated narrative coming from Madrid. We need to increase our readership and we need the community of El Nacional to include, at least, all those whom we address. If the central lane of Catalan society votes again and again, in each election to the Catalan Parliament, for certain parties that have well-known national objectives, this must be reflected in the media map, at least in the digital press.