- With these words he explained a few years ago what was the essence of Mariano Ferrer’s work a politician who did not appreciate the Donostian journalist very much: “The task of having a critical awareness of the people has been imposed.”
I've remembered the phrase for two reasons: on the one hand, because the portrait that enemies sometimes do with intent to disqualify becomes the best praise that someone can receive; and on the other, because it makes it clear that journalism, when done with capital letters, brings you as many enemies as friends. But at the end of the road, when Mariano Ferrer's voice has turned off, there's a legacy above the xextras of this or that party, of someone who's spent their whole life committed to the trade.
After studying at the University of Navarra and in Madrid, Ferrer completed his academic training in New York. “In the United States, I lived in an advanced society and the media had an attitude of democratic demand for power. When I arrived here I found a radio that I couldn’t report,” Imanol Murua Uria explained in the book What I said and what I say. “I told myself that we would inform him in one way or another.” And one morning in 1971 he stood in front of the microphone to, taking El Diario Vasco and La Voz de España – at that time you could not buy any other newspaper – start reading the news of the day, in an inimitable personal style, explaining what the news says, what they did not count or did not want to count. He did it for almost 35 years, every morning.
He participated in the creation of the Egin newspaper and was its director, in disagreement with the line in which he was taking the newspaper, until he left the project with an editorial that he wrote in 1977 criticizing an attack by ETA. At the age of 39, he reappeared in Herri Irratia and since then Ferrer's voice has spread both through the microphone and by other means: at the university, on television, in various media in Euskal Herria they have gathered their contributions. He gave voice, face and pen at the Elkarri Peace Conference in 1994 or on the platform against macro-judgment 18/98.
He did so without flags, without bands, sitting instantly next to what the conscience dictated to him. This ethical attitude has no expiration date, it is above all fashion; it is the model left to journalists today and tomorrow.