Liz Castro on Catalonia - Gerard piqué, context, and going to the source

Hi, this is Liz Castro, computer book writer and fan of Catalonia. I wanted to talk to you, with this gravelly voice that I have, I have a bit of a cold I wanted to talk to you about Gerard Piqué, who's a famous Catalan football/soccer player He plays for Barça. And about something I saw on Twitter this morning and about the importance of going to the source of your news and especially to know who is telling you the story. So, this morning I woke up and found this quote right here in my Twitter stream. It says, "Gerard Piqué says: 'Independence will make us weaker', it's better to stick together... "better together" This was written by a unionist politician and I was curious because Gerard Piqué is a very famous footballer/soccer player from the Football Club of Barcelona (Barça). His girlfriend is Shakira, so the two of them they're sort of a power couple between sports and pop music and he's known for going around with a Catalan flag, he speaks Catalan he gives interviews in Catalan and you know you don't want to depend on sports person to give you your political views, but it's nice if they do give you [their] political views to quote them properly, in context. At least that's what I think. So, I wanted to see where this came from and if he really said that. Let's look. So I went to the radio station that interviewed him. It's called RAC1. And here is is in the interview. This is him on the right. And on the left is the interviewer, Jordi Basté. And the radio station gives a kind of summary of the interview, but it's not a transcript. And you can see the political part down here. So what I did was I went and I listened to the interview. And it's kind of interesting what it says. The part that's left out of that quote by the unionist is that Piqué said, "a l'inici de tot" And that means "at the beginning". So here's the translation into English. "At the beginning, what independence will do is make Catalonia weaker and it will make Spain weaker, separation, anything that separates makes the two lands in question weaker." Then here's the part that did *not* get quoted. "From that point on, obviously, I don't know how it would go. Nobody knows." Those are kind of important things to add, you completely take his quote out of context if you miss that part. And at the end, he goes on and he says, "Me truthfully, no, now, it's what I think, I mean, in the end if not, it would be going back to an era that if people don't have the right to give their opinion or say what they feel, and man, it would be like going back to an earlier time that we're already done with. I think that evolution moves, we're going, we're looking forward. We shouldn't look backwards." So *that's* what Gerard Piqué said. And it's up to you whether you want to follow what a footballer says but certainly there's a lot of people who are influenced by him and it's important to get the information right. Well, let's see exactly how that information was reported. We already saw how it was reported by the unionist politician. In a Catalan newspaper, called Ara, it's pretty independentist, I have to say, they do underline the fact that he said, "at the beginning". In La Vanguardia, they don't even talk about it, and they quote Piqué has saying "My son will be Catalan because he will be born in Catalonia" And in the article they do talk about what he said about independence. El Periódico, which is a Catalan newspaper, excuse me, it's a Barcelona newspaper talks about Shakira and whether or not she's going to speak Catalan on her next record I thought that was pretty funny since it's an article about Piqué's interview. El Mundo, which is a very unionist paper, has a totally different take. It says, "with independence the two lands would be very weakened, very debilitated" Um, yeah. That's not the whole quote. Here we have MediterráneoDigital, where they go the same route, And they say "Independence will make us weaker" That's the stress. E-notícies: Piqué says "Independence will make us weaker" And finally, we have La Voz Libre, which is really a terribly slanted newspaper Not only do they quote him as saying that "Independence will make us weaker" but then, in the translation of the article into Spanish, that don't say "at the beginning" they say "in principle" which frankly I find quite distorted. So, it's really important to remember where the news comes from. And so I wanted to show you one more thing, which is, that Catalonia has been in the news, in the American and English news a lot lately. But [be sure to] look at who's talking about it and where they're coming from when you read these articles. Because most of them come from Madrid. Giles Trimlett, in Madrid for *The Guardian*. Here's Routers, "Catalonia says tax impasse" bla bla. Carlos Ruano, from Madrid *Christian Science Monitor*: Andrés Cala, and they're in Madrid. *The Telegraph*, this is from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, he's actually in the UK. This is *The New York Times*, their main correspondent, Raphael Minder, is in Madrid. *The Chicago Tribune*, they get their AP line from Routers, excuse me, not AP, but Routers. And they're based in Madrid. *Irish Times* has a guy, Guy Hedgecoe, in Madrid. And *The Economist*, yay, has a correspondent right in Barcelona. And I have to admit that whether or not they're relying on correspondents in Barcelona has gotten slightly better in the last month or so, because they're realizing that the story that comes from Madrid comes from people who 1) don't know Catalonia as well and 2) have a vested interest in playing down the story of independence. So, mostly what I want to say is: Listen to footballers if you want to, but make sure you go straight to the horse's mouth, and listen to the direct quotes and be very wary, or [rather] very aware of where the news is coming from and who's telling it.