These lines are too big for me. I go back to the moment when I met Victoria Prego. A group of students visited her at RNE. She sat at a table and spoke to us at length about her job, patient, petite, with her legs far from the ground and that overwhelming confidence in her words. She conveyed a quiet passion for her work, she was, is and will be inspiring. Without intending it, she helped define vocations and marked a path, a trajectory, a way of doing things.
Prego school journalism is the essence of the job: observe, listen, ask, reflect, check and tell. There is nothing more and yet now we miss that simple formula every day. The rush, the immediacy, the precariousness, the battle of egos, all the enemies of a rigorous job have been making their way. She, like others from her school, stood firm to a way of being and participating in society.
Victoria’s latest professional project is called ‘The Independent’, that also defines her. She will be remembered as one of the journalists who brilliantly completed her career in each medium. She filled the screen with her petite figure at a time when television was looking for young and, if possible, attractive faces. His was in his deep gaze and serene voice, but above all in his credibility. She was born with an extraordinary communication capacity that she continued to nurture. On both television and radio she conveyed closeness, but she also stood out in the press, in ‘El Mundo’ as a reference brand and later joined the digital adventure. But for those of us who have dedicated a good part of our lives to political reporting, Prego will always be a reference. Sitting in the press gallery of Congress, she spent legislature after legislature as a witness to the great debates to tell what was happening from the wisdom that experience gives. It may have been uncomfortable for some and right for others but it has always been her, without a desire for prominence, in profile in that barrage of events where others did not miss the opportunity to be seen.
Although among all her legacy she will remain forever as the narrator of the Transition. Her merit was not to tell it but to lead viewers of different generations through an exciting stage in our history, placing herself from the position of observer and not protagonist. The great task of that work that defined her career, even above what she wanted, was to bring together the protagonists and construct a faithful story.
Victoria Prego has been a journalist without more, one of the best, but without more and without less. A mother and a grandmother, the best for her family. And a good companion, kind and accessible, committed to her job. The Madrid Press Association consumed part of her energy when life was already taking away from her. She had to preside over it in a difficult time, making her colleagues understand that medical care could not be maintained, which originated in other times but was economically unaffordable for the Association and for the system itself. It was exhausting to explain it, as is each of our battles in a profession that, far from being corporatist as perceived from the outside, tends to generate constant internal conflicts. In these complex times for politics and the profession of journalists, Victoria Prego’s serenity is an incentive to continue believing that the commitment to journalism is worthwhile, that the social function of the profession, not of its protagonists, continues to be essential. . Increasingly.
On the table in the office at the Association’s headquarters are the cards with his name that I keep with respect and that feeling that his chair is still too big for me. We say that in this country people bury themselves very well but I prefer to think as the song says, that good people don’t bury themselves, they plant themselves.
