He hates the state. His speech rejects everything that a decent man would embrace: the legality of actions, the truthfulness that supports dialogue and contribution to public enterprise.
A lover of cash – even when it arrives divided into small payments – collective money is a personal affront for Ricardo Salinas Pliego.
The defects that I underline, evident to the common citizen, have acquired transparency in recent days when the tycoon has unleashed his heralds to advance the defense of his television license.
Because if the elegant shark persists in not repaying his debt to the treasury, the State could revoke his concession: the same one that Ricardo obtained thanks to political favors, financial indulgences, a tailor-made privatization and a loan – which he will then ignore – from Raúl Salinas.
Faced with this fatal horizon, its communicators burst into the media with militant fervor to equate, in a uniform choreography, the possible closure of TV Azteca with the coup d’état against Excelsior in 1976.
The news at the service of the millionaire boss. The protection of one’s own has transformed into an editorial line.
It is worth reminding younger people of this when talking about the coup Excelsiorwe allude to streamlined censorship. To Echeverría’s intervention against a newspaper that was inconvenient for the PRI, then directed by Julio Scherer García: an esteemed journalist who – in the field of information – lived in more dignified times.
The coup against the cooperative went badly: infiltrated operators of the presidency took control of the newspaper through an extraordinary meeting that suspended seven colleagues, including Scherer García, and transformed the newspaper into a docile body, destined for irrelevance.
Thus, although past and present are not similar – although Scherer’s media prestige has nothing to do with the discredited space of Salinas, nor Echeverría’s methods with a possible tax execution – the unanimous choreography insists on imposing itself on public opinion.
The following lines serve to unmask the alleged model.
Ricardo Salinas Pliego lives his darkest days. The countless millions of pesos that the New Judiciary has definitively assigned to him – added to other no less minor conflicts that threaten him from various jurisdictions – risk erasing the adjective of tycoon with which he proudly defines himself.
A new refusal to pay by the debtor will open the door to enforcement proceedings. Simply put, the state could go after the taxpayer’s assets and take what they are owed. Including, if necessary, television.
With the risk in sight, Salinasplieguista spokespersons intervened in the public debate to call for censorship of fiscal justice. In a crazy historical parallel – the barbarism of equating Salinas Pliego with Scherer García – they intend to find a hiding place.
Azteca’s communicators began by underlining that before the coup against Excelsior There was a trade boycott, and the supposed historical correspondence to the present is found in Sheinbaum’s call a couple of days ago, when he asked – rhetorically – which advertiser would want to stay on a TV station that lies and promotes hate.
The president’s statements are full of support. In recent years, television has exchanged rigor for fiction: during the pandemic it ignored the health authority and, since then, it has broadcast distorted versions of national reality, encouraging a climate of hostility that has little to do with what the country experiences on the streets.
Forgetting his lying essence, the tycoon’s heralds – so different from the journalists of Excelsior like Cosío Villegas, Heberto Castillo, Ortiz Pinchetti, Vicente Leñero or Granados Chapa, declare themselves victims and assure that the President wants to muzzle them.
They don’t even remotely stop to think that censorship rests on a syllogism whose weight requires a truly major premise. And that entire deserts open up between their information devices and the truth.
They do not seem to realize that the dissemination of falsehoods constitutes a violation of the terms of the concession that the State has granted them in this regard his -emphasis deserved-radioelectric spectrum. That a public frequency is not a private fiefdom. That the concession is a collective good: a slice of common air granted to inform truthfully.
No one told them that preventing Salinas Pliego from continuing to spread false, decontextualized or deliberately hyperbolic news would not be equivalent to neutralizing critical voices, but rather to safeguarding the most basic right of the public: to receive truthful, contextualized and proportional information.
This manipulation must be banned in the name of democracy.
The truth matters. The fate granted to the press – and, in particular, the critical and professional press – determines the health of public life. Héctor Aguilar Camín let it be said through Galio’s mouth in that luminous novel about the coup d’état against Excelsior: we must be very clear in the ideas we sow, because ideas are the true transforming force of the world.
