A few days ago, at the presentation of the pre-release of The vice of power in Spain, organised by the journalism forum Conversations withPablo Pardo, correspondent for the daily newspaper The World in the United States, summed up the relationship of the all-powerful Vice President Dick Cheney with the press as follows: "Cheney chose to avoid the press, did not talk to the media, went for years without giving interviews and was proud of it".
In Adam McKay's magnificent biopic, one of the favourite films in the Oscar race, the politician's disdain for the media is well reflected. A contempt that is also well explained in the film. When you want to accumulate power and, more specifically, power in the shadows, the media is clearly a serious problem. If you can't handle them (which we see some of), it's best to avoid them. Cheney's strategy, in the end, was none other than to fly under the radar.
However, it is interesting to see how in a few years, dodging the media has become an impossible mission for politicians.. Perhaps it is still feasible to avoid the interest of some important media, to look the other way when journalists ask questions at a press conference, to resort to four recipes from the corporate manual - the bad kind - in a speech ("I have come to talk about my book and don't ask me about anything else") or even to use a plasma screen to be present... without being present at all. But what is no longer feasible is to act and accumulate power away from the magnifying glass of public opinion. A public opinion that used to have its lectern in the headlines, television channels or radio stations and that today boasts millions of loudspeakers that trill or post on the networks. Information has ceased to be a coveted and scarce commodity in the hands of the powerful and has become a whirlwind of news where sender and receiver share roles and where many times the true role of the journalist is to separate the new from fake.
There are those who believe that in companies, institutions, and therefore in politics, transparency is a decision. You can choose to be transparent or not. You can talk to the media or not. One can be in dialogue in the networks or not at all. The tendency, however, is to consider transparency as a non-negotiable. And in fact, even politicians as media-averse as Donald Trump have had to surrender to the evidence that what you do in the dark ends up coming to light, sooner or later. And increasingly, sooner. And that is why even those who disavow the media have ended up turning to it, if only to sow disinformation.
Today Dick Cheney's position would be impossible and in fact the vice-president will probably go down in history - among other things - as the last politician who was able to operate out of the spotlight. Shadow politics is now history.
By Ana Sánchez de la Nieta
Editor of Conversations with