Donkey Business and Asinine Journalism
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
FIASCO ON FLEET STREET Donkey Business and Asinine Journ&lisin By Janice Valls-Russell Madrid Britain's mass-circulation dailies were once categorized by Time magazine as among the worst...
...a kindly farmer, opines another reporter...
...A minute or two later, a Spanishspeaking reporter for the Star gave Felix about $420 and said he was buying the burro...
...The Sun churned out free badges urging "keep blackie in spain," and asserted that a long sea trip followed by six months of quarantine in England, not to mention an inability to understand English, would depress the donkey...
...now it sent a message to Juan Carlos asserting Blackie's right to "spend the rest of his life enjoying the pleasures of your country...
...He is pulled around the village on the donkey until he meets his effigy...
...Owen adds that Murdoch's men and their Star rivals feared a lynching when they arrived in Villanueva because they had learned that "the villagers do not kill donkeys and the animal lovers in Madrid had got it wrong...
...he needed his job...
...The unfortunate animal must however have been scared by the noise of the villagers yelling, beating drums and setting off firecrackers—unless, like many Spanish people, it had become conditioned to such tumult early in life...
...All that the wretched country, with its sour wine and turgid food, really has is sunshine...
...Smirking, its organizer, Sir Mark Prescott, told journalists: "What they do to that donkey in Spain is indefensible...
...The rival British posses drank copiously until el condenado's ride was over and the donkey trotted home to Felix Cantalejo...
...It is a land of blood which constantly finds pleasure in pain...
...Do the British really care so much...
...this year's donkey was called Moreno (Browny), not Blackie...
...Although billed as the brave Joan of Arc of the crusade, all she seemed to do was bounce from one squad to the other, weeping at the right moment and thanking the Sun or Star, according to her interviewer, for "saving Blackie...
...Before the fiesta started, both the Sun and Star announced the condenado was a donkey named Blackie that would be ridden until it collapsed, then crushed and bludgeoned...
...On both sides, hombres, this was amacho affair...
...The press described the gathering as "hare-coursing's premier event...
...A Star reporter commented: "If cruelty to animals is bad in Spain, it's horrific in Britain...
...If there's one subject the Sun and Star are qualified to handle," said a man from another London paper, "it's asses: They're doing it every day of the week...
...The RSPCA, Britain's leading animal protection society, said the donkey would be "better off if left in Spain" and deplored the whole affair as "a farce, a circulation war...
...Cock-fighting, dog-fighting, badger-baiting, cat-coursing (in which cats are torn to pieces by hounds) and other horrors are becoming "organized sports," in the words of an RSPCA official, and an excuse for gambling...
...Caring" is oneof thosevoguewords, like the "-wise" compounds of 20 years ago, that arrive in the UK already weary from overwork in America...
...The Murdoch posse was later caught "skulking through an olive-grove" allegedly looking for a duplicate donkey...
...Sadly, the Star man declined...
...That night, a Sun envoy approached the Star man and offered him $10,000 for the burro—more than it would have brought at Sotheby's...
...Less exotically, another UK correspondent put the youths of the village in the same category as English "yobs...
...The Sun, with Murdoch's business expertise to fall back on, realized it had got the tail end of the deal...
...The Star exulted: "Gotcha"— over a front-page photo of a receipt for 55,000 pesetas, in payment for "el burro de las fiestas, " signed Felix Cantalejo...
...At the end of February, a Madrid animal-protection society published an ad denouncing the ill-treatment of a donkey every year during a fiesta in Villanueva de la Vera, a village in the Sierra de Gredos, 104 miles west of Madrid...
...And the upper-middle and business classes, eager to imitate the royal family, are shooting more birds, though not yet on the scale of some aristocratic shooting parties that slaughter 1,000 birds in a day (the royal record is more than 3,000 pheasants in one day...
...TheStorwaslessvulgar but tried to involve King Juan Carlos by publishing a telex message it sent to him requesting that he prevent the "despicable" behavior of the people of Villaneuva...
...The Mayor of Villanueva denied tnat the animal is harmed and threatened to sue the society, but protesters and foreign newsmen rushed to the scene...
...That was before Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun...
...Since then, standards have fallen...
...The Star was being modest: It has more readers than that in Devon...
...Its rival announced that "your caring Star" had arranged for Blackie to be sent to a "sanctuary" in Devon (southwest England) where "dozens of donkeys" were awaiting his arrival...
...Their headlines proclaimed: "The Sun flies to the rescue" and "The Star flies to save doomed donkey...
...finally, "knives will be plunged into his battered body...
...Behemothic banks as well as dingy deparment stores and murky massage parlors proclaim how "caring"—and downmarket— they are...
...In February this year, the Mail blamed Spain's democratic regime for "a huge increase" in the number of fiestas—"all of them," it said untruthfully, "involving animal cruelty, mayhem and disorder...
...In fact neither Bond nor Zorro showed up...
...The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's flagship, doesn't bother its 12 million readers with political niceties...
...What of the natives...
...The Villanueva rider, called el condenado, may also represent a heretic condemned by the Inquisition...
...The most aggressive invaders were the teams from two London tabloids, the Sun and the Star, with the Daily Mail close behind...
...We've lined him up for a life of luxury in Surrey [southeast England] with a darling lady donkey called Coco to give him a loving welcome...
...Came the dawn...
...who writes regularly for THE New Leader on French and Spanish affairs, is also a contributor to the Economist and La Vanguardia...
...An officer in an English police force, who has watched many bullfights, once told me: "The people who make the most fuss about animals tend to be less concerned about human beings...
...Despite their diatribes, the militant scribes of Su« and Star got on well with him, partly because he ran a bar, partly because he was willing to let them fraternize with Moreno while a colleague took a photo to show the Sun or Sterin action...
...When the Spanish ambassador informed the Sun politely that its fiesta story was "completely false," it published his letter under a huge headline: "COJONES...
...The villagers were charming," says Edward Owen, Madrid correspondent of the Daily Express (a stablemate of the Star...
...Only then did they swing into action—in the direction of Felix's bar...
...he would be better off in Spain, "the home he loves...
...In reality, the condenado was, as usual, a man not a donkey...
...Sun men were anxious to ambush the Star before it built up its Devon "sanctuary" into a tourist attraction...
...Royal doings are not included in the RSPCA's report, but they set an example that makes its task difficult...
...Their heroic commandos reported that they were being insulted and threatened by vicious natives who were spitting and beating "drums of hate"—just like the baddies in old English films about colonial wars...
...One source suspects that a naive village councillor fed the story to the association in order to put Villanueva in the news...
...The Sun tried to brazen it out...
...Tom McGirk put it another way in the London Independent: "Spaniards have given up trying to plumb the British psyche...
...A genial man, says Owen...
...Is Spain civilized...
...A Sun man who spoke no Spanish gave Felix a bundle of pesetas and told him, in English, to look after Blackie on the paper's behalf...
...A personable woman member of a British animal welfare society tagged along...
...In heralding their "rescue" mission the Sun and Star had roared, "Watch out, hombres, we're on our way...
...We should stay away from it until [Spaniards] have lifted themselves above the level of the wretched beasts they torment...
...Early in March, 7,000 Brits (four times the population of Villanueva de la Vera) gathered near Liverpool to watch dogs compete for a national trophy by killing hares...
...FIASCO ON FLEET STREET Donkey Business and Asinine Journ&lisin By Janice Valls-Russell Madrid Britain's mass-circulation dailies were once categorized by Time magazine as among the worst in the world...
...In the late 1930s its owner, Lord Rothermere, supported General Franco's insurrection and advocated "appeasing" Nazi Germany by allowing it to acquire colonies in Africa...
...Even deer are in demand as targets (Prince Charles shot his first stag when he was 13...
...British politicians and vets approached by the Sun agreed mat to inflict Britain's cold, wet climate on the donkey for the rest of his life would be much more cruel than the noisy but short ride of el condenado...
...One of my favorites is "Your caring butcher...
...Well, in theory...
...It denounced the Star's plan to exile Blackie in "dank Devon" as cruel and selfish...
...asked a recent Sun editorial...
...it was neither crushed nor bludgeoned, and no knives were produced...
...The Right-wing Mail appears to dislike Spanish democracy...
...Give him a life in Britain...
...And the next morning: "Your caring Sun won't abandon Blackie...
...Felix, if not Moreno, was in clover...
...Tortured donkey is bought by The Sun, "that paper brayed on its front page: "The Sun has saved Blackie from a barbaric ritual death in Spain...
...Excited consultations with London followed...
...They wonder how the same race that sends hordes of hooligans on head-banging rampages across Spain can care so much about one donkey...
...Just two days before, the Sun had seen Spain as "a land of blood which finds pleasure in pain...
...The association alleged that the donkey was ridden by the heaviest villager until it dropped...
...The fiesta, held during the carnival week before Lent, is rooted in Catholic folklore which, throughout most of southern Europe, personifies Carnival by an obese man who arrives on an ass, presides over merrymaking and is then tried and burnt in effigy—a reminder of the fate awaiting sinners...
...It was rumored that they were having nightmares about thousands of families converging on Devon to pat the Star's ass...
...While Murdoch's minions were whipping up anti-Spanish feeling over Moreno/Blackie, the RSPCA published a startling report on cruelty to animals in the UK: 83,000 cases were reported last year, 27 per cent more than in 1985...
...The Sun and its rivals have recently run a campaign that will deserve a mention in any history of journalism for its irresponsibility, inaccuracy and contempt for the intelligence of the British public...
...it is just xenophobic and anti-Hispanic...
...And what of Moreno's owner, Seflor Felix Cantalejo, represented to millions of Brits as a sinister figure...
...Suddenly, the Murdoch camp took a great leap backward...
...By this point, even readers of the Sun were probably able to understand that it had lost control of its mount...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
