La Vanguardia has outdone itself today. See, it's real easy to tell when a publication is anti-something. The Spain Herald is quite clearly both anti-Socialist and anti-Catalanist, for example. It never publishes any articles favorable to either political persuasion. I don't think there's anything wrong with that IF you do not lie about what you are doing. The Spain Herald makes no secret of its political preferences.

La Vanguardia and most of the Spanish press are the same way about the United States. They simply never publish anything the slightest bit favorable, and in fact go out of their way to publish as many unfavorable perspectives as possible. The problem is that La Vanguardia pretends to be neutral and objective. Let's take today's edition as an example.

Most of Page 12 is devoted to a story on a blues bar in Clarksdale, Mississippi, partly owned by Morgan Freeman. The town "breathes a poverty accumulated during generations...unpainted shacks, percarious trailer houses,..abandonment and decadence." It continues, "Mississippi is also the poorest of the United States and that with the largest percentage of Afro-American population (39%). The two are not a simple coincidence. There are very high levels of functional illiteracy, family destructurization, drug addiction, obesity, cardiovascular illnesses, diabetes, and AIDS." One Blair Jernigan, director of the Delta Regional Authority (that is, a petty bureaucrat,) says "that the model to study is what was done in Japan and Germany after the Second World War."

Now, I have no doubt that everything in this story is true. There's a lot of poverty in places like Clarksdale, Mississippi. But it's not hell on earth, either, and I'm not sure why it's necessary to report on it over and over again as the European press does. I also can't believe that the guy found absolutely nothing attractive and normal in Mississippi to report on.

By the way, per capita income in Mississippi was $24,560 in 2004. Per capita income, specifically for rural black people in the whole US, was $16,489 in 1996, ten years ago. This is hardly cause for a Mississippi Marshall Plan. By the way, per capita income (not per capita GDP, they're different things) in Spain was $21,210, adjusted for purchasing power, in 2004. Seems to me there might be some degrading poverty to look at around here, too, which La Vanguardia rarely does.

But let's move on, to page 21. Here's a report on the February 23, 1981 attempted coup in Spain, and it includes a wackjob conspiracy theory alleging American involvement, of all things. It seems that one Juan Garcia Carres, a Spanish civilian involved in the plot, claims that the CIA was involved. One Juan Alberto Perote, a former CESID agent and vendor of conspiracy-theory tales, also says the CIA was involved and claims to have documents to prove it. One Jose Oneto, another vendor of conspiracy yarns, says the same thing. So three very unreliable sources allege that the Americans were trying to overthrow Spanish democracy. That seems to me like an extraordinary charge, which should be front page news if it were true. And, of course, if you are publishing such a charge, you must have plenty of evidence that it is true. But all the Vanguardia can come up with are claims that one Commander Mac Donald (sic) met with "many" of the military officers involved, that US Ambassador Terence Todman also met with military officers, that the US military bases were alerted on February 19, and Sixth Fleet ships were deployed along the Spanish coast. Sources, please?

On page 33, there's a scare story by our man Andy Robinson getting hysterical about the absolute power of the creationists in the American theocracy. It seems some NASA PR guy semi-creationalistically edited some NASA scientist's report. A stink was made and the PR guy was eased out. What's the headline? How about, "Nothing happened?" No, it's "And God created science...in the US: Creationism infiltrates NASA through a public relations representative who censored scientific reports." And Andy's reaction in his story is, "Other scientists at public institutes have denounced interference. It has been complained that spokesmen for different public agencies have silenced them or have manipulated their investigations in different areas...'There are two factors in the suppression and manipulation of information: one is commerical and the other is ideological,' said Lexi Shults of the Union of Concerned Scientists." Readers might look up the Union of Concerned Scientists here. In case you were wondering, it's a far-left group started by Noam Chomsky in 1969 to oppose the Vietnam War. Neutral and unbiased, it ain't. And neither is Andy.

The lead story in the Culture section on page 39 is "An anti-American Rambo." It's on that Turkish action movie starring Gary Busey and Billy Zane as the Yankee villains, both of whom I am permanently boycotting. The writer, Marc Bassets, is mostly fair, saying that the German press had criticized the flick as "cheap propaganda against Christians and Jews," though he can't help noting that the Turkish-German audience at the Berlin screening he saw applauded when the movie ended.

Get this one on page 8 of the Living section. Seems that Catalan TV played up a report from Guantanamo. TV critic Jordi Ballo is disappointed there's no film of anybody being tortured, since the reporters were not permitted to film the prisoners and prison officials demanded the right to censor the film. He calls the report "excessively submissive." Wait a minute, when was the last time an army let third-country journalists into one of its prisoner camps? I think this is the first time. But, no, it's not good enough for Jordi Ballo, who insists that the Catalan TV reporters should have insinuated that there was great evil going on, in the style of Frederick Wiseman and his "reality-fictions."

 On page 51 Rafael Ramos manages to include a reference to Joe McCarthy in a story on the Chelsea-Barcelona soccer match.

But you'll search the archives of the paper in vain for a positive reference.