“I want to do the program that I would like to hear” was one of the most outstanding reflections launched by the director and presenter of El món to RAC1 and collaborator of La Vanguardia, Jordi Basté, in an exclusive meeting with subscribers of the newspaper, held this Wednesday at Casa Seat in Barcelona, ??and which has been moderated by the deputy director Enric Sierra.
The meeting began by recalling Basté’s beginnings at the helm of El món a RAC1, the leading morning program in Catalonia and fourth in Spain. The journalist has affirmed that it was not he who gave the step from sports information to general information but rather that he was “cheated”. When Xavi Bosch left him in 2007, and after the refusal of three other journalists to succeed him, the management of Grupo Godó and RAC1 proposed to Basté that he take over. “First I said no, but after discussing it with the family I agreed to present the program for a year and so they had time to find a replacement. It’s been 15 years…”
What is worse is getting up so early, around four in the morning, for so many years, especially “that terrifying moment from when the alarm goes off until you go to the shower; So I tell myself ‘today is the last day I work’. But the magic of the radio continues to captivate him and although each season the continuity of him at the helm of the program is considered, Basté continues because “if I quit, then what will I do?”
In that radio that he likes to listen to and do, he has a key role “putting a microphone on the street and talking about what worries people, which does not mean being populist but popular.” The journalist has also pointed out that “politics is in low hours, it has become a save me; The appearance of social networks and digital media in search of clickbait does not help either.
In addition to his radio facet, Basté also regularly collaborates in the newspaper. “Writing a column for La Vanguardia is an enormous responsibility,” he confessed, recalling with Sierra some of his most famous summer sections in the newspaper, such as when he created a Tinder profile or embarked on a luxurious cruise.
And returning to the radio and above all to the genre of the numerous interviews he has carried out, Basté admitted that the person who has had the most difficulty interviewing is Oriol Junqueras. “He is terrified of headlines because sometimes they are taken out of context,” he has pointed out. The director and presenter of El món a RAC1 has also pointed to Rosa Maria Sardà as another of the most difficult characters he has interviewed in his career. And among those who have been a charm of interviewees? “Oh, many, Maribel Verdú, David Trueba, Pablo López…”
Asked by a subscriber who he would like to interview that he has not yet done, Basté said that Michael Jordan, his idol as a young man. He also stated that he regretted that in all these years he has interviewed as many presidents of the governments of Spain as of the United States: one. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Jimmy Carter. “This is an anomaly and it despairs me.”
