The renowned journalist José María Carrascal has died in Madrid at the age of 92, the ABC newspaper reported this Friday. In the 90s he was a news presenter for Antena 3. He also worked as a correspondent for several media outlets in the USA. He worked for many years for the ABC newspaper, where he wrote his last column last Tuesday, analyzing the swearing-in of Princess Leonor on the constitution. He has written twenty books, both fiction and political analysis, and was awarded the Nadal Prize in 1972 thanks to the novel Groovy. In it he tells about a young woman who gets involved in a crime after arriving in New York and decides to join a hippie commune.
Born in El Vellón in Madrid in 1930, Carrascal is one of the most recognizable faces of Spanish journalism due to his long career on television, radio and in the print press, having dedicated 65 years to the profession. In 1986 he received the Mariano de Cavia Prize and in 2021 the Luca de Tena Prize. He began working in Germany in 1958 as a correspondent for the newspapers Pueblo and Diario de Barcelona. Eight years later, in 1966, he moved to the Big Apple to work there for ten years. During this decade, as a writer for the ABC newspaper, he interviewed former US President Ronald Reagan. From there he also reported for the radio station Antena 3 and for Radio Televisión Española.
In 1989 he returned to Spain and became a news presenter for Antena 3, which hired him to direct and moderate the “Noticias de las Eight” immediately after it began broadcasting, becoming the first private television in Spain. First he was the face of the afternoon, then of the night. In 1997, Carrascal himself announced on the air that he would stop broadcasting the news program at the station’s decision.
His unique way of presenting news shaped the style of reporting current events for almost a decade, and he became one of the best-known television presenters of his time. After his brief appearance on the show We Are All Humans, which he co-hosted with Javier Sardà, he moved away from the cameras and instead devoted himself to written journalism. In the last years of his life he continued to write opinion columns for La Razón and Abc.