Miguel Ángel Campos, from Cadena SER, is the first journalist who revealed in the program Hour 25the existence of e-mail by González Amador’s lawyer in which he asked for an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office so that his client would not end up in prison for his alleged tax crimes, and not the other way around, as Miguel Ángel Rodríguez had claimed. that Campos talks about e-mail, of which he put parts of the writing in quotation marks to quote them on the radio. At the trial he explains the delicate process of publishing news of this caliber, already told last Thursday by José Precedo, of elDiario.es, which revealed the exclusivity of the tax investigation: that knowing something from a source does not mean you can say it immediately, in the same way that opening Twitter and publishing the first thing that comes to mind for your or your bosses’ benefit is not news.
Therefore, Campos reveals that one of his sources called him to tell him that this document existed, and to his disbelief, the source tells him to go to his office and check it. A taxi dropped Campos off at that location after 3.30pm, six and a half hours before the Attorney General had that document and, he says, he can see the document that disproves Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s hoax: “He shows me on the screen of his computer that email from February 2nd. There I read the sentence that two tax crimes were definitely committed.” Campos says, “I ask him to forward it to me, he says no. I ask him to print it for me, he says no. He won’t leave any physical trace of any of this. But he lets me take notes.” Campos thus breaks down the obstacles that even a reliable source, in order to protect itself, poses to the publication of news. This goes further. Because as he went to the radio with his notes, the person who helped Campos saw them e-mail She calls him scared: she doesn’t want him to publish anything, the information contains personal data and he doesn’t know how many people may have had access to it. So the journalist knows that there is a bombshell story, but he cannot publish it in this way. And spend the next few hours looking for more.
A serious leak of information is being tried in the Court of Cassation which is attributed to the accused, the State Attorney General, and in the process a way of doing journalism is being explored in depth, through some witnesses who are investigative journalists (the wayspecifically). It is difficult, from the outside, to think of a conspiracy between several journalists from different media who agree to know in advance the content of the e-mail of the FGE to save him, but this was already known in the instructions.
At the beginning of his testimony, Miguel Ángel Campos offers the parties a short lesson. “A source is not someone who comes by and tells you something without further ado. It’s something a journalist works on for months or years and builds a deep relationship of trust. If there were no solid sources capable of providing valuable information, journalists would just be mouthpieces for power,” he says. And he gives an example. Campos recently received a recording from a source implicating the socialist Santos Cerdán in collecting the commissions. He called the PSOE and everyone denied it: it’s a lie, it’s up to you. But Cadena SER trusted its journalist and its competent sources who, moreover, had never disappointed them. And the bomb was dropped. This was confirmed the next morning. “Sources – concludes Campos – are not so much a right of the journalist as of society”.
There is a moment, like a few days ago, when attention seems to shift. And instead of a court, it seems like the jury of a journalistic award, trying to find contradictions and black holes in journalists’ investigations. Sometimes the reactions to elementary facts produce a certain astonishment, such as that, naturally, the news is withheld if it is not adequately verified or if the wishes of the sources, however painful, are respected. The clash is understood: they are two different professions, journalists and judges and lawyers, who agree in seeking the truth but with different rules.
