Why has the Sánchez government placed 280 journalists on a watchlist since 2024?

Lisbon. Anyone following Spanish current affairs on social media will have noticed that, for the past couple of days, a great many Spanish journalists have been displaying on their profiles a sort of passport-sized photo accompanied by a brief summary of their professional background: political analyst, expert in [subject], contributes to [publication], centre-right, centre-left or conservative, or, worse still, ‘highly critical of the current PSOE’ (Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). Perhaps the most scathing label has been applied to Antonio Caño, a doyen of Spanish journalism and editor-in-chief of the daily El País from 2014 to 2018, who has been branded here as a ‘notorious anti-Sánchez figure’ (coincidentally, Caño was forced to leave El País in 2018, just a few days after Sánchez took office at the Moncloa Palace).

This business with the passport photos is not just another social media gimmick, but the result of an exclusive story published on Tuesday by the daily newspaper Confidencial. It has emerged that the Ministry of the Interior, led since 2018 by former magistrate Fernando Grande-Marlaska (that is, since the first Sánchez cabinet, which has since seen many ministers come and go, but not him), has been systematically compiling files on journalists, complete with passport photos and everything, including a brief description of their (alleged) political ideology. In total, around 280 files have come to light concerning as many journalists and various commentators, a large proportion of whom, by commenting daily on current political affairs, fuel the Spanish television schedule – which is itself rather ‘high-calorie’, and at times one might even say ‘doped’ with infotainment.

The document consists of dozens of pages and bears the letterhead of the Ministry of the Interior and its communications department. According to Confidencial, the initiative reportedly met with resistance amongst ministry officials. Some raised concerns about its constitutionality, but ministry sources, when they could no longer deny the report, assured that participation in the profiling exercise was voluntary and that no one had been forced to take part. They also insisted that it was not a blacklist. Minister Marlaska, during Question Time in Parliament on Wednesday morning, reiterated his apologies to anyone who might have felt offended, but described the files as a simple “working document”. These were identical words to those of Pedro Sánchez, who was appearing on the main public television channel for an interview at the same time. “It strikes me as a truly inappropriate document,” said the Prime Minister, but he regards it as harmless, a trivial journalistic classification exercise with no specific purpose. It is the right, he insisted, that is increasingly threatening journalists and media organisations.

To say that the purpose of a project that required time and resources from part of the minister’s staff is unclear is putting it mildly. Added to this is perhaps the most interesting detail: the document’s creation date – February 2024. This is the year in which the political debate in Spain, already quite fierce, shifted into a significantly higher gear. Scandals, hitherto unknown or merely the subject of rumours, and suspicions that had long been featured in newspapers most critical of the government, began to turn into legal cases that directly embarrassed the Prime Minister. In February, Koldo García, the right-hand man of the former Minister of Transport José Luis Ábalos, was arrested on charges of having pocketed bribes in connection with contracts relating to the purchase of face masks during the pandemic (both the former minister and organisational secretary of the PSOE, and his assistant, have now been definitively convicted). In mid-April, it emerged that the judiciary was investigating Begoña Gómez, Sánchez’s wife.

It is now common knowledge that, that very same month, the Prime Minister withdrew from public life for a few days to decide whether or not to resign. When he reappeared, he announced that he would carry on. The most recent investigations, however – those implicating another former organisational secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, and the former Socialist activist Leire Díez – tell a different story. The courts will have to confirm this, but there is talk of a scheme set up within the party to bribe or slander investigators and journalists whose work was getting in the way of those pulling the strings. Meanwhile, the Ministry of the Interior was merely taking notes.