• Pepe Oneto. Memories of that independence
  • Media: The journalist Pepe Oneto dies at 77

I remember perfectly the day he arrived at the Madrid newspaper , any one in the autumn of 1967. His striking distinctive of the blond bangs on the right side of his head would accompany him until today, which he left us at the Quirón clinic in San Sebastián, where He had been admitted since mid-August. He worked then in the writing of France Press, where he was a good friend of his delegate in Madrid, then François Pellou, whom he frequently accompanied in his professional visits , not at all as an interpreter, but as an empathic person who facilitated human relations. Because Pepe Oneto was a great journalist and a great guy .

They were times of editorial turn of the Madrid newspaper, which would go from being a kind newspaper destined to the placid reading of the bourgeoisie, to a politically combative environment. Pepe Oneto would enter that renewed wording, which I don't know if the first day he visited, but in any case he came to stay . That same year of 1967, Nativel Preciado, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, Cuco Cerecedo, Federico Ysart, Alberto Míguez and, shortly thereafter, others that would be neat to name, entered the editorial. Because today I evoke with great feeling that he was one of the most prominent, or the most versatile of all those editors , for the number of branches he went through and settled, both in the press and on television, without forgetting his long walks on the radio

At first he combined, something almost forced at the time , his work in Madrid with which he played in France Press. But soon he stuck exclusively to the newspaper, although he maintained some external collaborations . He carried with great rigor the political and economic information that had been entrusted to him until in 1971 the newspaper was closed by the Ministry of Information in charge of Minister Alfredo Sánchez Bella, although he was already touched to death by the previous owner Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Then, Oneto, who had already begun writing a daily political chronicle for the Colpisa agency, continued in that medium that sent his works to fifteen regional newspapers, including La Vanguardia de Barcelona.

In 1974, he began a new stage of his life that would lead him to national recognition when he began his work as a political informant for the magazine Cambio 16, of which he was appointed deputy director the following year and, to the other, director, position in which he would play from July 1976 to January 1985. From the direction of the magazine became an inescapable reference of the Transition. He also collaborated with other publications of the group such as Diario 16 and Historia 16. Then he spent another year as director of publications until his relations with the company deteriorated to the point that Oneto denounced the owner company invoking his conscience clause .

Shortly thereafter, he began working in Group Z as a political chronicler and in June 1987 he was appointed director of the magazine Tiempo and for several years he would be a talk show in Protagonistas, of the COPE network, and on television in A mi manera and Hermida y Cía.

In July 1996 he went on to Antena 3 as director of news. There would be little time because the following year. Telefónica bought the television network and relieved him of the post . Then he returned to Group Z as director of publications and continued as a television talk show in programs such as La mirada critic or Day by day, in Telecinco. In radio he was in Herrera on the wave and with Carlos Alsina in La compass. Oneto was in everything and everything stood out from the beginning to the end of his days.

Pepe Oneto has been a difficult man to summarize because of his enormous journalistic work . There would always be gaps in his biography no matter how thorough it was. Television made it possible for us not to be friends and acquaintances who had only the privilege of their friendship or their treatment. Television also made it possible for all of Spain to know its speech easy , sympathetic, with irony, sometimes slightly caustic if the situation required it. With his Cádiz grace and some Madrid casticism that had adhered to him after most of his life in the capital city.

JOSÉ ONETO , a journalist, was born in San Fernando on March 14, 1942 and died in San Sebastián on October 7, 2019.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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