New Spanish website has the country's prime minister in its sights
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Version 0 of 1. Pedro J Ramírez, fired in February 2014 as editor of the paper he founded, El Mundo, is making Spain’s government nervous with his new project, a news website called El Español. The Financial Times reports that among its 72 editorial staff are some of the country’s best known investigative reporters and, even though the site’s official launch is still weeks away, it has already signed up almost 9,000 subscribers. Ramírez, in seeking to hold political and economic power to account, echoes arguments by the International Press Institute about state intervention threatening press freedom in Spain. In an interview with the FT’s Tobias Buck, Ramírez argued that it was necessary for the press to “be the counterweight... against the concentration of political power and the concentration of economic power”, but the mainstream newspapers were failing in that task. Ramírez has always argued that his firing from El Mundo was an act of retribution for his paper’s reporting of corruption allegations involving the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. The government has denied the claim. Buck writes: “With a general election looming at the end of the year, and several corruption scandals simmering away, his [Ramirez’s] scope to embarrass the Rajoy government is likely to be considerable.” Source: Financial Times |