Antonio Machado:" FOR THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF' NEW IDEA '" The anniversary of the founding of a newspaper, to be held by those who feel love letter printed. Well you do. Messrs. Editors New Idea, in devoting a special issue to the pomp day marks one year that publication. Yes, the appearance of a newspaper in a small town that had no own press, is an event of much more importance than the visit of a person or party onomastics of a chief. some years, it is customary in Spain to speak ill of the Press. I have not ever joined the slanderers. I am convinced that in our country, the newspaper is the only organ of popular culture seriously. Press contributes to civic life is a reflection, perhaps the most faithful of the collective consciousness. Without the press, given the constitution of modern societies, our lives would languish in a clumsy privatism , immoral, selfish. Ignorance, as regards the interests of all immediate consequence of the lack of Newspapers, soon dissolve nations Kabilas, urban tribes. Only supporters more or less conscious, more or less muffled, a throwback to barbarism can be enemies of the newspaper.
In villages where there are many more schools, public libraries and circulating, where books are sold by the thousands, that is, in those towns where the newspaper, the daily sheet and flywheel, has a mission secondary from cultural point of view is, however, loved and respected newspaper. In our Spain where no one reads a book, where institutions are far from decent sources of powerful spiritual radiance, not missing informers of the periodical press, people who receive any further publication of this nature as unwelcome guests, as the intruder snooping comes to inspect, to annoy, to get, perhaps, in light of the street, the dirty laundry of the house. Needless who claims the high culture, higher education, to disdain the modest role of the journalist. Is this a way to take the spirits vain Boeotians to disguise their hatred of print.
Men devoted to research deeper and more serious subjects of knowledge are, regular newspaper readers, do not disdain the flyer which includes the beating of the day. But the Pharisees abound of culture that boasts of not reading newspapers, serving notice that, devoted to science, have no place to unnecessary readings. Distrust of them are usually men who clog black. The worst of the illiterate, it is certainly, that of the serf, hunched over the homeland from dawn to dusk to earn a living, there is illiteracy doctor cap and tassels infinitely more deplorable.
admire the great press, these mighty rotary bring us daily news from all corners of the planet, but also love and respect to these modest provincial newspapers that meet humbly and sometimes at great sacrifice, a holy mission: to safeguard the common interests of those who live, away from large cities, these corners of the English nation.
In this beautiful city between Moorish and La Mancha, whose venerable stone reads a glorious past, in this noble Baeza of old intellectual tradition, it took a newspaper and you., My dear friends have managed to create.
My warmest congratulations on this anniversary and with it, expressing my gratitude and my sympathy.
Antonio Machado
New Idea , Baeza, February 11, 1915, p.9.
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An edition and study of this article, along with another published by Antonio Machado in Baeza same newspaper under the title "Don Francisco Giner de los Ríos" ( New Idea , Baeza, February 23, 1915), can be seen in the work of Manuel Urbano Pérez Ortega, "Contributions of Antonio Machado in Baeza Press" Bulletin of the Institute of Giennenses, 90 ( 1976), 107-116, which can be read at the next full link:
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