The journalist Iñaki Gabilondo has starred in a meeting with students, professors and alumni of the University of Navarra, as part of the Back to basics cycle organized by the School Communication. In a session entitled "The future of communication in a polarized society", Iñaki Gabilondo spoke about how to practice journalism with a capital letter, guided at all times by the fact that communication professionals are references of solvency for the rest of the citizenship. "Journalists have to build territories of trust. Ethics is at the beginning and the end of our survival," he said. "Journalism is born with an inexorable commitment to society and democracy, like a surgeon with the life of his patient, whether in a public or private center. We are public servants because we comply with a commandment that is the right to information".  

Iñaki Gabilondo pointed out that journalists have the obligation to tell what the citizen has the right to know and, to those who defend an 'activist' journalism, he recognized that today's world "still does not know how to place itself correctly between ideological affinity and independence". "The bad thing about an ultra-polarized society is that it does not spare journalists their commitment to their professional ethics, but it makes it much more difficult. Is there a way to practice journalism in a polarized society? No. Journalism is the same as always, it is just more difficult to practice it. The truth tends to move very uncomfortably in territories of radicalism," he said. 

Iñaki Gabilondo encouraged students to "live like journalists, with the pores of life open. And, faced with the avalanche of new technologies and new formats that must be "relearned", he commented: "What we have to do is journalism: with decency, quality and independence, which always remains". Iñaki Gabilondo added that journalism provides informative material to understand reality, contextualize it, order it "and, playing fair, make it intelligible". 

He also pointed out the need for communication professionals to be demanding and rigorous and to work with solvency, which requires decency and time: "In the society we live in today, there is more and more insistence on the traceability of products, knowing where they come from, their ingredients... Many times we are not so demanding with information, but we should be even more so, because journalism affects your vision of life and the origin of that information matters". 

Iñaki Gabilondo, former student of the University of Navarra, wanted to imbue his speech with a dose of optimism before the communication students. "You have chosen the right official document , only that we are facing a moment of enormous transformation in which it is difficult to make a diagnosis of the status". He has also encouraged the students to look for new ways of telling stories and to solve many of the problems that now exist in communication. "The world is full of opportunities: those that exist and those that you are going to build. The future is built with what you do, with what you don't do and with what you allow to be done," he concluded.