Yesterday I visited the Faculty of Journalism of the Central University to invite the students to present content for the Internet every Wednesday, such as documentaries, interviews, and reports that they have done, but I did not go to propose this to the journalism professors but to the students, I visited the Student Association, which has an office on the first floor. In place there were a few students in front of a television, watching the match between Brazil and Serbia in the World Cup in Qatar. I asked them why, in the Ecuadorian team, there was no player from Quito, the capital of Ecuador that has the largest number of soccer teams and even soccer schools in the country? We analyzed how the main problem of the mountain players was their physical conditions, which resulted in short stature, the product of chronic malnutrition for centuries, and height, which created people for sports such as mountain climbing, marathons, long-distance races, cycling, with Olympic champion Carapaz.
Why were there few players from Guayaquil, the largest city in the country, with the most popular soccer teams in the country, Emelec or Barcelona, and their soccer schools? The reason is that young people in Guayaquil quickly become corrupted and complicated with vices and vanities.
Why do the most numerous players come from the black ethnic groups of Imbabura, especially from Esmeraldas? We conclude that it is because Esmeraldas allowed the existence of blacks, who escaped from slavery 500 years ago and were able to live on beaches and tropical forests, where hunting and gathering were their main food sources, which added to their genetics gave them a great physical build, that since the 60s of the 20th century, soccer managed to capture his warrior and competitive spirit, which defeated the Spanish conquerors on numerous occasions, and even gave rise to revolutions such as the Liberal Revolution in 1895 with the Revolutionary Vargas Torres, then were the ones who fought against the conservative reaction and the liberal betrayal of Lonidas Plaza, between 1914 and 1917, through a civil war led by Carlos Concha. in times of the First World War. the Yellow Fever and the end of Ecuador as the world's leading cocoa exporter.
Unlike the blacks of the Imbabura, who did not come from the Mandigo of the African Atlantic coast, but from the jungles of the Congo, and who were brought by the Jesuits for their cane plantations and who turned them into Catholic fanatics, extremely submissive and obedient, and even created a black farm in the Valle del Chota, creating the first artificially selected human race, giving rise to a very strong and resistant population, which now stands out in weights, and soccer. I also pointed out to them that football had become the religion of the God of Money, where billions were invested in stadiums and in the organization of the World Cups.
The way to get the attention of the students was to ask them which branch of journalism you think is the least risky, because in Latin America, especially in places where there is drug trafficking, like Mexico, journalists are murdered. The answer was that the journalists who make sports news are the ones who have the best life, because they can, scream, and lose their heads, and the more theatrical they are, the more emotions they can arouse, the better they are, they can also travel paid to many places where there are events sports, they can finally even become media stars. Before there were very few women in that role, but now they want to be sports journalists too. Of course now on the internet, there are endless people who make their own sports content programs, who are not journalists but who have a large audience.
Then there are the news journalists, reporters, presenters, and interviewers, who are the ones who capture what is happening and try to draw attention to problems that communities or countries are experiencing, which can be political, health, economic, social, and even wars, where they have an important role, since the conquests of Greece or Spain, journalists or people who tell what happens in war are important. Today, it is precisely those journalists who report what is happening in the so-called War on Drug Trafficking who are the most murdered in Latin America.
With the pandemic, the journalists who reported on what was happening in the streets, homes or health centers became vital, today many doctors became producers of health programs, leaving journalists aside. and with the environmental crisis scientists or explorers, make documentaries and programs.
But the place where journalists have a more important role for media owners is political journalism, and this is because the media is powerful these days.
When we analyze the role of journalists in politics, where media hit men like some of the CNN journalists are television stars, we analyze how politics became religion or fanaticism, mortal gods, as are the presidents of the powers now with nuclear weapons, spaceships, great development of artificial intelligence, control and surveillance over all citizens of that country and even of other countries, which now has the ability to destroy everyone on the planet, a power greater than any god and as religion for centuries became politics, and now persists in theocratic governments like the one in Iran that tries to maintain the belief in immortal gods.
What is fundamentally what a journalist handles? - I asked the guys. They answered the truth. So I told them that the truth does not exist, that what exists is knowledge. Why doesn't the truth exist?
Because it pretends to be eternal and nothing is eternal, not even the Universe that we now know had a beginning and will have an end.
But knowledge is a truth - the boys argued.
That's right, knowledge is truth but of short duration, that always navigates in the sea of doubt, that constantly changes, that gets rid of old knowledge or uses it to understand new ones. That knowledge is always new, even that is discovered in the old as what happens in archeology.
So if a journalist does not handle the truth, because the truth does not exist, and knowledge is handled above all by scientists, and teachers. What is really handled by the journalist? - they asked me.
What the journalist handles are the facts, that is, time. But there are many forms of time, physical time is related to speed, distance, matter, and energy. Biological time with genetic information, climate, extinction, and human time, has to do with their technology, their knowledge, and their coexistence.
So the weather changed from the countryside to the city, the weather in the countryside depended on the sun and the moon, or the seasons. Time in the city depends on electricity, machines, and inventions that allow you to work day and night, and produce much more in an hour than with the work of animals or humans on land or sea. Time changed with the wheel, the horse, the car, the boat, or the plane, which changed our relationship with physical space, with the planet, and now our relationship with other planets, with the sun with the universe, is changing. which we are exploring.
Time changed in our genetics, which now allows us to live longer, and time changed in our communication, which went from communication that took years to receive a response, to communication in real-time, which allows us to instantly know what is happening. think, what is done, what happens. Something that is absolutely revolutionary and that changes the human being, the entire Earth, and is even beginning to change the Moon and Mars.
The journalist went from being a chronicler of the Indians in the conquest and colonization of America, of the oceans, to be a link between human beings inside and outside the planet.
But the professors at this university keep telling them that journalism is politics, that politics is everything. So I explained to them that politics is the power of cities, and cities have become the greatest invention of humanity to such an extent that we are already thinking of cities in space, on Mars, but that in Ecuador politics became parties, and the parties in electoral advertising agencies and that the elections are a social drug that, like any drug, makes it seem that the future will be wonderful while the electoral euphoria lasts and that later turns into a hangover, into a depression that makes us feel stupid, because for 200 years and 120 governments, most of the rulers were the worst of us in all aspects, from the physical aspect to the mental or social aspect. The policy since the times of Greece to assassinate, betray, destroy, the best, to allow the worst to come to power, and control life and everything that exists in a territory, is to have the power of the gods to decide the fate and death of everything in a country.
The worst enemy of politics and religion has always been science, but now that the internet and daily life force us to choose something every day, and that exercise of choice is the cradle of our personality, which makes it more difficult for priests and politicians to appropriate the soul and mind of other human beings.
Then we talk about the war in Ukraine and we find out that Russia is guilty because its government limits human freedom, Ukraine for wanting to be part of NATO, and NATO because it is a threat to Russia, the worst thing about this war is the nuclear threat to everybody.
