The journalist Miguel Ángel Gozalo, former president of the EFE Agency and former director of RTVE, died this Wednesday at the age of 85, according to family sources.

Gozalo (Madrid, November 16, 1938) had a long and dense professional career, from his beginnings in the Madrid press in the sixties to the presidency of Agencia EFE, passing through media such as Ya, ABC, Cadena SER and Television Spanish, of which he became director.

The vocation for writing began in adolescence, when from Germany, where he studied for a while, he wrote to his mother everything that happened to him. This vocation made him stop studying what his father wanted, Law, and enter the Official School of Journalism, where his grades already predicted the journalist he managed to be.

He managed to be number one in his promotion, which included his ‘soul brother’, as he called Jesús Hermida, but also Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and his wife, Isabel Hernando.

He immediately became a contributor to the newspaper Ya and the newspaper Arriba. He was editor and editor of SP magazine, editor-in-chief of the Europa Press Agency, and editor of the newspaper El Alcázar. In 1967 he moved to the newspaper Informaciones and a year later he was named deputy director of the newspaper Madrid, a reference for the liberal currents of the time and which had a “very professional” editorial team, as Gozalo himself used to emphasize.

Five months after joining that project, the censorship opened a file against him for the publication of an article signed by Rafael Calvo Serer entitled Retire on time: no to General de Gaulle, which was considered a very serious violation of the Law of Press and Printing. For this reason, the newspaper, which would end up being closed in 1971, was suspended for two months and Gozalo fined a considerable amount.

Already in 1972, Gozalo began working at ABC until 1975 when he joined Cadena Ser as director of Information Services. A year later he took over the news program of the Second Channel of TVE, Editorial at Night, but he ended up resigning in 1978, in protest against the restructuring of the public television organization chart.

He spent a season directing the Department of Media Relations at RTVE, then directed the magazine Teleradio and in 1982 he began working in the cultural space of public television El arte de vivir, which he left when he was named director of TVE on the 28th. August of that same year, a position in which he remained until December.

He was head of the Press Office of the Spanish Credit Bank, a position that he combined in January 1988 with the direction and moderation of the TVE program Derecho a discrepar, from which he was dismissed in 1989 for a program on the topic Public lives, private lives in the that the guests expressed opinions about the private lives of some celebrities such as former minister Miguel Boyer and his wife Isabel Preysler.

He chose to sue TVE for his dismissal and in 1990 the Supreme Court declared the dismissal null and void between his dismissal and the date of termination of the program on March 30.

Already in November 1994 he took office as a member of the board of directors of RTVE at the proposal of the PP and on May 28, 1996 he was appointed president and general director of the EFE Agency by the Government of José María Aznar. During his presidency, he strengthened his position in the United States with the launch of bilingual information services aimed at the Hispanic community, the Photo Library was founded, the commercialization of services through the Internet and the digitization of graphic and print files began. press.

An international service in Portuguese was also launched in Brazil, the news publishing desk for America was inaugurated in Miami, the Multimedia Coordination Unit was inaugurated in Madrid and the International Graphic Service was launched. During this stage at EFE, he was part of the Board of Trustees of the Cervantes Institute.

Starting in May 2004, when Alex Grijelmo succeeded him at EFE, he continued collaborating in social gatherings and it was not unusual to see him at the most diverse news events. Likewise, Gozalo was one of the twenty-two professionals who founded the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1997, an institution that in March 2017 recognized them with the Extraordinary Talent Award.

On December 5, 2018, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Constitution, he was one of the journalists honored by the Cortes as journalists who lived firsthand and reported on the constituent process.

This year, in 2023, he was one of the protagonists of the Maestros del Periodismo podcast, a project promoted by the Madrid Press Association (APM) and the La Caixa Foundation. In the interview conducted by the director of the podcast, José Antonio Piñero, Gozalo was convinced that journalism “will survive, because there will always be people who need things told to them in a different way.”