The journalist Diego Carcedo, who was director of News Services at TVE, managing director of International Relations at RTVE and director of RNE, died this Sunday in Madrid, as confirmed by sources from the Association of European Journalists (APE), of which he was president of the Spanish section.
Born in Cangas de Onis (Asturias) on March 24, 1940, Carcedo began his professional career in the written press, but soon found the space in public radio and television to develop his vocation. His name has remained linked to RTVE, where he developed almost his entire professional career: he held multiple responsibilities, from foreign correspondent to news director and head of Radio Nacional de España (1991-96). In addition, he was a member of the board of directors of RTVE (1996-2007) and in 2018 he chaired the Committee of Experts to propose the members of the board of directors of RTVE and opted to preside over the Television Academy.
The beginnings as a journalist of this diploma in Journalism from the former Official School of Madrid and degree in History are located in the Oviedo newspaper The New Spain (1965-1968). He continued his career as an editor and correspondent for the Pyresa agency and the newspaper Above. He was a special envoy in America to the “football war” between Honduras and El Salvador (1969) or to the Áncash earthquake (Peru, 1970).
Already in 1974 he joined TVE, where he was editor and special envoy and where he did much of his work on the program. The reporterswhich allowed him to travel to more than a hundred countries. It covered events such as the last days of the Vietnam War with the evacuation of Saigon (1975), the beginning of the Central American conflict, the different wars in the Middle East, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the coup d’état against the Chilean president Salvador Allende or the earthquakes in Managua, Peru, Sicily and Iran. A long life as a reporter that led him to interview more than thirty heads of State and Government.
In 1978 he became a correspondent for TVE in Portugal and in 1984 he became head of the TVE correspondent in the US, a position in which he remained for three years, when he was dismissed along with seven other correspondents by the then general director of RTVE, Pilar Miró. After his dismissal, he requested leave from TVE and worked as a delegate of the EFE agency in New York, as a correspondent in this city for the weekly The Independentas director of a news service for distribution in America and also a collaborator of several television networks in that country.
Already in 1989 he replaced Julio de Benito as head of TVE’s Information Services. It was until February 1990, the year in which he was replaced by María Antonia Iglesias. He became director of International Relations at RTVE and was later appointed director of RNE in 1991 by García Candau. Five years later, after Mónica Ridruejo took office as the General Directorate of the public entity, he was replaced as director of RNE by Javier González Ferrari. From July 1996 to January 2007 he was a member of the board of directors of RTVE, at the proposal of the PSOE and within the Senate quota.
His replacement occurred when the first board of directors of the new RTVE Corporation was formed. Between October 2006 and 2010 he was international president of the Association of European Journalists (APE) and since 2007 he has presided over the Spanish section of this organization, of which Miguel Ángel Aguilar is its general secretary. Among other awards, he has received the Cirilo Rodríguez Prize for Journalism (1985), the extraordinary Antena de Oro of 1992 and the APEI Prize from the Professional Association of Radio and TV Reporters (1996). He is the author of numerous books such as ‘Rifles and carnations’ (1999), ‘A Spaniard in front of the Holocaust’ (2000) and ‘Between beasts and heroes. The Spaniards who stood up to the holocauto’, which won the Espasa Essay Award in September 2011, among others.
