Conflict of Interest

In an earlier post I noted that a former Vanguardia columnist, Eugeni Madueño, was behind a newly launched publishing venture, Edicions Clariana.  Clariana and by extension Madueño have produced more than one hundred pages of City of Barcelona colour inserts in La Vanguardia since early January. Yesterday's paper brought two such inserts: one published by Clariana, and one--the one-hundred page glossy Vivir en Vanguardia--by La Vanguardia itself. The latter looks like a magazine, yet there's nothing on the spine, and an ISBN rather than an ISSN; of only four pages of add copy, two were placed by the city hall. One of these two pages, the back cover, is simply the City of Barcelona logo magnified to 75% of the width of the page. That is, it nearly looks like an official publication. The editor? Eugeni Madueño. Madueño is both publishing for city hall and working for a paper with a mandate to cover city hall. Mr. Madueño would seem to be subject to a conflict of interest: he can't be expected to report objectively on a level of government which is paying him. Then again, it may be naive of me to expect a clean separation of the fourth estate from government.