“I want to do the program that I would like to listen to” was one of the most outstanding reflections launched by the director and presenter of El món on RAC1 and collaborator of La Vanguardia, Jordi Basté, in an exclusive meeting with subscribers of the newspaper , held yesterday at Casa Seat in Barcelona, ??and which was moderated by assistant director Enric Sierra.

The meeting began by recalling Basté’s beginnings at the head of El món on RAC1, the leading morning program in Catalonia and fourth in Spain. The journalist stated that he was not the one who made the transition from sports information to the generalist, but that “they deceived him”. When Xavi Bosch left in 2007, and after the refusal of three other journalists to succeed him, the management of Grup Godó and RAC1 proposed to Basté to take over. “At first I said no, but after talking to the family I agreed to present the show for a year so they had time to find a replacement. It’s been 15 years,” he commented.

What makes it 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; then I say to myself ‘Today is the last day I work’. But the magic of radio continues to capture him and, although every season he considers his continuity at the head of the program, Basté continues because, “if I leave, then what will I do?”.

In that radio that he likes to listen to and do, he plays a key role in “putting a microphone on the street and talking about what worries people, which does not mean being populist, but popular”. The journalist also points out that “politics is in low hours, it has become a Sálvame; nor does the emergence of social networks and digital media in search of clickbait help.

“Writing a column for La Vanguardia is a beastly responsibility,” he confessed to recall 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 back on the radio, a subscriber asked him who he would like to interview if he hadn’t already, and he answered that Michael Jordan, his youth idol. He also regretted that in all these years he had interviewed so many presidents of the governments of Spain and the United States: one. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Jimmy Carter. “This is an anomaly and it makes me despair.”