In the bathroom door of the Faculty of information sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid, a painted summarizes some discomfort of many students of journalism. The Scribble says: smiles, this school is a joke. They complain of the lack of exercises, of teachers, of the repetition of the content of the subjects, facilities with safety they would change their five years of photocopied notes to vomit in exams by listening to a keynote talk that touched points more transcendent and sensitive of the profession of journalism. Not more than one hundred of those students attended the Conference offered to Spanish journalists Rosa Maria Calaf and Ana Pastor. For the second consecutive year, the solidarity NGOs invited the communication experts to think aloud about the need to transform the world from the media and, therefore, from the Faculty responsible for educating future journalists. About to retire after brilliant years as correspondent in China, Russia and United States, among many others, Rosa Maria Calaf thinks about the excess of information today. Not in terms of its variety, but the incessant repetition of the same thing in the universe of channels offered by new technologies.
The domain of immediacy as absolute value in the mercantilist journalism trivialize information and deprives it of its substance. You get off the plane and they ask you what you think about certain things, as if one knew more after crossing an ocean, he commented. The usual confusion between what is urgent and what is important allows cameras and microphones are loaded into a helicopter to have exclusive before anyone else to the place of the conflict, although this suppose to leave on Earth half a ton of food. In this line, the media drown the viewer with stark images that arouse an ephemeral solidarity that disappears with a new catastrophe. What Kant described as the damping of the sensitivity in the hands of the usual flows into what Rosa Maria Calaf called syndrome of tired piety.