2024-01-31 09:12:46
Starting this Tuesday, January 30, 2024, the vault of the Cervantes Institute, which contains secrets and symbols of writers and artists of Hispanic culture, also stores the style manuals of the main news agency in Spanish and some of the most recognizable from the history of Spain, those carried out by EFE in the attempted coup d’état of 23F in 1981.
A good part of this legacy has been deposited by the president of the agency, Miguel Ángel Oliver, under the watchful eye of the director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, who has considered the work of EFE “every day more necessary like the air we breathe.” for its “honesty, reliability and rigor.”
Especially at this time because, as he has said, “in times of floods the first thing that is scarce is drinking water, and in times of information overabundance, like the one we live in, the first thing that is scarce is truthful information.”
This Tuesday the Caja de las Letras was opened, according to García Montero, to “a journalistic reference” who, in his opinion, has been able to detect “the dangers of post-truth” and the emergence of artificial intelligence in “an overabundance of information that “it stalks our democratic systems.”
Oliver has also stressed the need for credibility on the part of the media, proud that this kind of time capsule has been opened to save the New urgent style book.
The manual, co-published with Cervantes, has had the executive coordination of EFE journalist Javier Lascuráin, who has explained that the book is very new, as its name indicates, but also old because it is heir to a long tradition of style texts. of the agency, which was a pioneer in this type of work.
A “living and useful” legacy for society, he specified, in whose pages the urgent style bookfrom 2011, coordinated by the former Director of Information and International of EFE Emilio Crespo, who has introduced a removable memory with the web EFE makes historywhere the history of the agency is collected digitally.
The Box of Letters, this kind of “sacred chamber”, has allowed Oliver, a great lover of archaeology, to fantasize about the “treasure of words and images” that EFE has delivered for posterity.
«It is the human treasure of language, the one that defines humanity. “Here we leave our codes,” commented Oliver, who deposited the style manual edited in 1978, days after the Constitution was approved.
To this he has incorporated another book in which articles from large firms are compiled that at one time were also compiled in the agency’s work and that with their chronicles gave a meaning beyond the journalistic.
Several ambassadors, members of the diplomatic corps and representatives of various media outlets were present at the event, including the former president of EFE, Gabriela Cañas.
At one point during the event, all eyes were directed at an exceptional protagonist who was accompanied by the current Director of Documentation and Archives, Paloma Puente.
The photojournalist Manuel Barriopedro has delivered a copy of a photo of him that went around the world and for which he has received multiple awards: that of Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard Antonio Tejero on February 23, 1981 in the Congress of Deputies, gun in hand.
He has accompanied it with another from his colleague Manuel Hernández de León, who captured the moment in which several coup plotters pounced on Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, lieutenant general and vice president of the Government of Adolfo Suárez, at the moment he ordered them to hand over their weapons and to leave the building, which they refused.
They were different times, it was 1981. The cameras were not digital, they were analogue with film, and these and other information professionals of this house had already transmitted, through images or teletypes that were rolled up in the newsrooms, many historical milestones. , and those that remained to come, furthermore, with the revolution of social networks and artificial intelligence (AI).
This January 30, the Caja de las Letras has been opened, according to García Montero, to “a journalistic reference” who has been able to detect “the dangers of post-truth” and the emergence of artificial intelligence in “an overabundance of information that stalks our democratic systems.
The Cervantes Institute has welcomed the EFE Agency which, as Emilio Crespo has stressed, is a story full of stories, as many as news its journalists have written to tell in Spanish what is happening around the world, from all its corners. And so it goes 85 years.
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