The disappearance of Álvaro Prieto was one of those cases that became a magnet for morning television audiences. An 18-year-old young man, engineering student, athlete, goes out to party with some friends and misses the train in Santa Justa-Seville. He tries to take another one, but is evicted by the security services. No ticket, cell phone without battery, no card, no cash, no charger... Four days searching, police, the UME and her dogs... And the body appears live on TVE.
The infotainment is more sauce and less information and in each live show one more ingredient is added to the chronicle of an announced misfortune. Until Mañaneros, the La1 program, broadcasts some images of the body between two cars. They are not live things. The journalist warns of what he and the cameraman have seen, they have corroborated the coincidence of the clothes with the young man's friends and a convenient zoom guides us to the macabre discovery: "I don't know how to tell this", "we have seen something suspicious... ", "you are going to see it right now", "I want you to look at it"...
Jaime Cantizano's face reveals journalistic “atrocity” and social networks certify it. Álvaro Prieto leads all trends in Spain, leaving Israel and Hamas behind. And after the name of the victim, the punishment to RTVE: “Not everything goes”, “delete” are trending topics. Álvaro Prieto drags users and their algorithms towards other tragic events followed on TV just as tragic: “Alcàsser” – “we didn't learn anything from Alcàsser” – or Marta del Castillo.
Paco Lobatón makes his experience available to the avid audience of Who knows where. “We must stop the reproduction of the images broadcast by TVE (...).” Three days ago, the journalist presented at the Audiovisual Council of Andalusia a guide to address cases like Álvaro's with rigor, quality of information and respect for the rights of missing persons and their families.
Cantizano is the face of an apology: “The images should never have been broadcast,” they were removed from the digital broadcast and made available to the judicial police. But it's already late. “The damage is as enormous as it is absurd,” Gabriel Rufián tweets. RTVE's code of ethics is explicit: it is necessary to "harmonize informational interests with the obligation to avoid unnecessary pain to both victims and family members"; “reproducing high-impact images solely for their visual value is not justified”; “close-ups of corpses are always unnecessary”… Not everything goes, not everything goes, not everything goes…
