De Prada, career award and the limits of journalism

De Prada, career award and the limits of journalism

Pepe Oneto, Victoria Prego, Pepa Bueno, Matías Prats, Luis del Olmo, Pedro Piqueras, José María García. The list of award winners is published by ABC and leads to one more name: Juan Manuel de Prada. An award for an entire career as a journalist. It sounds like peaceful recognition, a family photo and a handshake. But as soon as someone brings it up, sparks fly: since when is De Prada a journalist?

The question is not innocent. Some argue that he has never worked as one and that he does not hold a degree in the profession. Against that, the obvious defence: if he has been paid to write articles regularly for years, the label fits. Two ways of looking at the same profession and, underneath, a third front that denies the main premise: that a genre called opinion journalism even exists.

Is Juan Manuel de Prada a journalist or a writer?

The core of the disagreement is the definition itself. For some, a journalist is someone who practises journalism regularly, whether paid or not, whether they write columns or cover news. Under that criterion, a daily columnist is fully part of the club, just as a politician with a law degree is still a politician. The comparison is repeated over and over: nobody disputes that Pedro Sánchez or Feijóo are politicians because they did not study Political Science.

The objection comes from another direction. De Prada — it is argued — is a literary man, a columnist, a writer who has never wanted to be anything else. His role would be formative, not informative. He does not report on anything; he gives his opinion on almost everything. And that distinction, they maintain, is not a minor nuance: mixing opinion and information is a confusion of genres that is clarified in the first term of any journalism school.

Some go further and place the discussion in the realm of self-serving labels. Calling a journalist someone who writes essays, columns or sarracena prose would, in this reading, debase the craft on both sides. Neither the writer benefits nor does the street reporter recognise themselves in that list of awards.

On the ground, ideological suspicions also cross. Part of the conversation places De Prada in the orbit of the cultural right, with awards, columns and a constant presence in the press. That this is the reason for the controversy sometimes says more about the observer than the observed.

Opinion journalism: a real genre or an invention?

Here the exchange becomes technical and somewhat heated. One side resorts to the encyclopaedic definition: opinion journalism is a common genre in the form of an article, on a current topic, signed by an author, in a media outlet. Radio, television and press. So far, reasonable.

The reply is blunt: no such thing exists. What exists, they say, is a mixed genre that combines information and opinion, and universities describe three classic communicative types. The encyclopaedia, in this reading, serves the average reader and not academic rigour. Each accuses the other of confusing a rosary with a scapular.

The detail that neither side can deny is that there are subjects with that name. The University of the Basque Country is cited. The European University of Social Sciences is also cited, according to which opinion journalism does not inform because it does not provide new news. The discussion, therefore, is not whether the term circulates, but whether it should. And underneath lurks an uncomfortable suspicion: that the opinion genre is the alibi with which some media disguise as information what is only commentary.

Training, information and the profession nobody defines

There is a third way that tries to resolve the tangle without winning the fight. De Prada would fit neither in informative journalism nor in the mixed one, but in a separate terrain: that of formation. He does not tell what happens; he proposes how to think. It is the difference between news and doctrine, between the fact and the interpretation that wraps it.

Under that prism, discussing whether he is a journalist would be like discussing whether an essayist is a novelist. He fulfils another function. And precisely for that reason, they point out, the label of journalist would sit badly with the interested party himself, who would see in it a deformation of his craft as a writer. The matter gains interest when it is remembered that Azorín signed columns all his life and nobody disputes his place in the history of literature.

The underlying problem is one of era. The border between informing and opining has become so blurred that the media live off monetising the confusion. The star columnist sells more than the reporter. And the reader, who senses it, distrusts both the fact and the comment equally.

From the trench on the profession to the compilation of quotes

As the interventions go on, the tone changes. From the dispute over the profession it moves to something else: a succession of quotes attributed to Kant, Confucius, Rousseau, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Thomas à Kempis, Plutarch, Mazzini or Bentham. Maxims on suffering, truth, freedom, wealth or death. As one of them summarises, "suffering is the necessary condition of physical and spiritual maturation."

It is a revealing turn. The conversation that began by asking whether someone is a journalist ends up compiling sarracena sentences. Phrases about judging oneself harshly and forgiving one's neighbour, about wealth that smells bad when it piles up and fertilises when it is shared, about freedom understood as a consequence and not as a goal. Someone summarises the paradox with a dry criticism: a hyperbole without evidence that ignores the necessary balance between continuity and reform.

Links to external materials also appear — a text translated into English by a publisher of Carlist affiliation, a piece on metabolic oncology, another titled "The Anarchy of Lies" — which push the conversation towards popularisation and activism, beyond the journalistic profession.

What is really being discussed

When the undergrowth is cleared, a simple and uncomfortable issue remains: what is a journalist today. Qualifications, salary, regularity of byline, social function. No one agrees because each criterion serves a cause. Defenders of the guild want doors, degrees and ranks. Critics want the label to miccionan something more than being paid to write.

And in the middle, a writer who has spent half his life publishing articles and who has just received an award that honours some and offends others. The award settles nothing. On the contrary: it puts a name to a sustancia ilegal that runs through the entire Spanish press, the one that separates the one who reports the facts from the one who comments on them.

The most striking thing is the duration. The discussion is still alive, with new quotes, new links and the same arguments from the first week. There are controversies that burn out in an afternoon and there are questions that are recycled forever. This one belongs, apparently, to the latter.