With total impunity, the media is publishing reports accompanied by photographs including leaders from the pro-independence bloc and which claim to be revealing some unknown news or even put them in a predicament. Obviously, there would be nothing to say if it was news obtained by conventional means. In other words, the result of investigative journalism. The problem arises when the mechanism is not normal and reasonable doubts are posed about the implication of Spanish or foreign security services in obtaining the information or when the aim, by methods of sometimes doubtful legality, is to violate privacy. Is this information clean for publication and should it receive the treatment of investigative journalism?
The conflict between the Spanish state and Catalonia has substantially shifted some of the professional ethics criteria previously known and, to put it gently, things which until very recently would have been widely denounced now fit under the umbrella of the fight against the independence movement. It's not now, as it was a while ago, about reports which revealed police operations and arrests before the police arrived at the residences or the town halls.
Newspaper, audio and visual archives are full of these examples. Now, photos are being published of politicians of rather lower degrees of popularity discretely travelling in planes to Brussels, or they have access to passenger lists which shouldn't be public as if they were hypothetical criminals. Or they have images of the editor Oriol Soler leaving the Ecuadorian embassy in London after discretely meeting Julian Assange. How quickly Alfonso Dastis, the Spanish Foreign Affairs and Cooperation minister, links this meeting with a destabilisation of democracy in Catalonia from Russia after it was published in Spanish newspaper El País seems ridiculous but it's too serious to take it as a joke. Can we ask current politicians for this level of rigour?
Two more examples: Clara Ponsatí, the Education minister exiled in Brussels, has given some details about her security in recent weeks in Barcelona, before she left Catalonia, reporting that she was very regularly followed and that, by coincidence, some documents she gave to a friend for safe-keeping were robbed after a raid on his professional office. Or what about a group of journalists who attended a meeting with people close to Puigdemont and Junqueras and a person who had been advised of the meeting arrived before some of the attendees. A photograph of one of them entering was used to fabricate a whole report. Journalism.