I WAS SUPRISED to read this Reuters dispatch about a far-right demonstration yesterday in Madrid; being a news junkie, I'd suppose I'd have read about it by now, but I hadn't:

Hundreds of far-rightists draped in Spanish flags marched through Madrid on Sunday, demanding the government put a stop to immigration which they said was turning them into foreigners in their own country.

"We are here to protest at the government's immigration policy, which is converting Spaniards into foreigners in their own country," said Fernando Cantalapiedra, 25-year-old leader of the Falange, a far-rightist group which organised the march.

"(The government) is giving social benefits to immigrants when we have a serious unemployment problem," he told Reuters.

The Falange was one of the core supporters of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. With 8,000 members, it describes itself as a promoter of national unity.

Demonstrators also burnt a Catalan flag, in an apparent protest at attempts this year by the Catalan and the Basque regional governments to win greater autonomy from Madrid.

What a bunch of jerks, and I mean all of them. The guys at the demo and the guys at Reuters. They are giving prominence, as if it was an ominous sign for the country, to a group of lowlifes with no impact whatosever.

No, I'm not saying the press should silence jerks -otherwise most newspapers would consist almost entirely of blank pages!- but at least they should focus in relevant jerks. This demo was such a non-event that not even progressive/leftist media in Spain noticed it; I have only learned about it -and that's because I searched for it after reading the Reuters piece- two small town newspapers publishing a very brief agency report. Oh, and Reuters chooses the word "hundreds", which isn't a lie technically speaking because there were more than one hundred, after all. But it gives the impression that there were lots of people, even several thousands; at least that's trick the press used during last September demonstration against the war in Iraq on American cities when they wanted to inflate their success, isn't it? According to the few published reports in local newspapers I mentioned, the number of far-rightist jerks at the demonstration yesterday in Madrid were less than one thousand. I get more people in my weekend parties at home, almost...

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