Évole calls for door-to-door campaign against Horizonte, ratings leader

Évole calls for 'door-to-door' campaign against Horizonte, leader in its slot

Jordi Évole took the stage at the elDiario.es Festival of Ideas and Culture to ask for something rarely heard from a TV presenter: that the public go 'door-to-door' among their acquaintances to get them to stop watching Horizonte, Iker Jiménez's program. He did not get into a debate about content. He called for a campaign. And in the same speech he admitted the fact that fits worst with his thesis: the show he targets is the ratings leader in its slot.

"If you can do a little door-to-door among your acquaintances and tell them: hey, no, don't believe everything," he urged the audience. The jab had started with irony: "It's not very normal that, in this country, the man who used to explain to us that UFOs were coming is now explaining the country's corruption to us." The phrase sums up the core of the conflict: who has the authority to tell which things.

The uncomfortable data: ratings leadership

A speech against a program is of little use if the program wins. The presenter himself had to admit that Horizonte is the leader in its slot, and that is the number that has shaped the entire subsequent conversation. Those who come out in its defense do not refute the underlying argument: they display the data.

The market reading is simple and annoying. The audience does not behave like a mass that needs to be warned house by house; it behaves like a market, and in that market the product they complain about is the one that sells the most.

The setting: a festival by a digital outlet

The context matters. The intervention did not take place on a TV set or in a face-to-face debate, but at a festival organized by a digital outlet, with an audience present and an open microphone. That gives the message a rally-like air it would not have on air, and explains the concrete proposal: convince your neighbor, one by one. Some reaction in the conversation dismisses it with sarcasm: if the problem is the viewer's lack of judgment, the solution does not seem to involve a leaflet and a ladder.

What is the club 61 that appears in the controversy?

It is the label circulating on social media for a reference to 61 journalists who, according to messages being spread, would appear flagged in Leire Díaz's agenda. The accusation is not backed by any ruling and moves in the realm of partisan attribution. Even so, it has entered fully into the response to the presenter: the number is repeated in every conversation, as return ammunition.

The mechanism is familiar. When a speech calls for not believing everything, the counterattack looks for the track record of the person signing it. And there club 61 works as a reminder: each side has its list.

Aldama and the logic of 'don't believe everything'

The most repeated argument against that intervention is that the criterion of discredit is applied in only one direction. It is maintained that Aldama has been providing evidence and that his previous predictions have been coming true. It should be stressed that this is a framing: these are partisan claims, not verdicts.

There lies the knot. The call to 'not believe everything' requires, to be credible, a standard that is also applied inward. If the criterion is the credibility of the source, the same yardstick should apply to one's own sources. No one has yet explained why it does not.

From Otegi to Rita Barberá: the ammunition that comes back

The counterattack has two classic pieces. The first, the presenter's past interviews with leaders of the abertzale left. The second, a ruling that, according to published reports, sided with Rita Barberá's family and forced him to issue a public correction on his program. The symmetry is the whole argument: whoever demands credibility from others drags along their own corrections.

From here the ground becomes slippery, and it is best to tread carefully. That a published correction exists is a fact. That the accusations circulating about third parties are proven is another matter, and in most cases they are not.

The uncomfortable thesis: two pawns on the same board

There is a third way that annoys both sides: the one holding that both presenters are pieces of the same polarization device, each covering a flank of the spectrum so that the discussion never leaves the left-right axis. In its most extreme version, that idea drifts into conspiracy theories—freemasonry, controlled dissent—that lack evidentiary support and only shift the fight to another plane.

In the available material there is no public response from Iker Jiménez to these statements. What is there is the ratings data and the call for a campaign.

The reproach of public money

Another current of criticism focuses on the business. The presenter is reproached that his current position—producer, presenter and influential figure—has been built on contracts and programs sustained with public resources. It is a recurring reproach in the public debate about the Spanish audiovisual model and, in the terms in which it circulates, it also comes without documentary verification.

With the ratings data confirming what the speech denounces, the interesting question is no longer whether the presenter is right to point at Horizonte. It is why part of the public is willing to believe Iker Jiménez before the man asking them not to believe anything. Neither side has answered that. Nor does it seem to interest them.