Carlos Franganillo opens his first Telecinco News standing up. It is surrounded by giant screens and starts (9 p.m., Monday night) with the Junts threat to Pedro Sánchez (“if there is not a binding and agreed referendum, red color!”) and with the discrepancies over the control of immigration. The summary of his debut is completed with something about Trump, with the risks of pornography, with the danger of radon gas and with the advance of lava in Iceland: they are invitations to stay and look beyond the political dispute.
Immediately afterwards, Carlos Franganillo sits down. He continues to break down news and focuses on poverty in the world denounced by Oxfam (with mention of the housing shortage in Spain)… and with the Davos forum in the background: I notice in the news choice and the expository tone some aftertaste of commitment to social denunciation, without going overboard.
Carlos Franganillo stands up again: he connects with the great Dori Toribio, veteran correspondent in the United States. The giant, curved screen allows Franganillo to review percentages of how close the race to the White House is between Biden and Trump…
The veteran Pedro Piqueras did not move as much as Carlos Franganillo moves. Piqueras called his climatic and tectonic apocalypses without moving a muscle in his body. For his part, Franganillo has not mentioned his predecessor’s eighteen years of work at the outset, although at the end he has recovered his old background set with skyscrapers to promise his audience that he will be faithful to his legacy: “example and independence of Pedro Piqueras, from whom I take the baton, will serve as a reference for us,” he declared before saying goodbye.
The legacy that Franganillo revisits is that of reporting without stridency and without editorializing (as the Antena 3 news programs do, which give Pedro Sánchez and his government partners no respite). Carlos Franganillo takes it calmly and from a distance, he does not want to be the protagonist of anything and serves a neat, neat, formal, very correct and bordering on bland news. He will never embarrass us or make mistakes, he will never say one word louder than another or startle us.
Dark suit, white shirt, discreet tie, well-groomed gray beard, Franganillo warned us this Monday about the radon gas that accumulates in the basements of some houses, lethal in the long term as a carcinogen (public service!), and brought us a book about the prostituted women in the Nazi camp of Ravensbrück, and also took us to the studies of plastic artists on Flemish painting in the Prado Museum. Everything very balanced. Franganillo makes an agile and light news, with a homeopathic dose of Spanish politics that is almost relaxing: a news that is a light dinner, a news that will never become indigestible.
