There will never be another Lanata

“You sons of bitches, you finally came up with a good joke!” Lanata said, laughing, at home, at a monologue meeting, on a Wednesday one year that I spent with the best.

There are journalists who are very good at research, there are others creative, some cultured, some sensitive, some brilliant and a handful brave; The only one who had all of that and more was Jorge Lanata.

You never quite understood how he did it, but he did it. You spent more than ten years at his side watching the trick, and because he was generous, he showed you step by step, he explained it to you. But it wasn’t the same for you, it wasn’t the same for anyone. That’s why there isn’t and won’t be another Lanata.

During all these years Argentina was without control, with a political class as dubious as the imitations of Journalism for everyone And given that justice comes late and sometimes badly, for many Lanata was the only one who could find out the truth. “Lanata should know.” Everyone would tell you something about every topic. It was neither the government nor the judiciary, the hope was Lanata.

The guy was also disobedient, a virtue that some editors don’t like, but the public does. The thing is, he gave the assurance that he would say what others dared not say, in the most brutal way, “because I can prove it.” He always said what he wanted. So one morning on the radio he called the man with the highest ratings on the station we were on a “clown.”

A few days later I told him at home, “Can you believe he sent me a message?” He said as he pressed play on WhatsApp and gave me his phone number. The “Clown” wished him good luck for the new season PPTas if nothing had happened. “This is television,” he said with his trademark half-smile.

When we wrote the monologues with Miguel Gruskoin (“The Hero,” as Jorge rightly called him) and the sketches with Cristian Alonso, only he read them. There were no middlemen, there were no restrictions. Not even yours. He was so intelligent that if the text challenged something he thought, he could reconsider his position.

Someone once sued him because of a joke I wrote. It didn’t go any further, but he never commented on it because when it seemed right to him, he made it his own. He didn’t make any accusations, he didn’t say – like many others – “the screenwriters wrote it for me.” Besides, it was a good joke.

Something that allowed us to push the envelope with humor was his ability to laugh at himself. Since I was unable to walk during the debut in 2019 due to a fall I suffered, we wrote in the monologue: “When the station saw me in a wheelchair, they didn’t know if I would come PPT either Carburettor“That’s how the program started, because if there was one thing that didn’t fail with Jorge, it was the dark humor.

It wasn’t easy to be fully part of the Lanata world K effervescence. We were, among other things, “mercenaries,” “boy thieves,” “coup plotters,” and “Yankee embassy employees.”

For years, working with Lanata meant being excluded from everything else. “Everything else” was the huge job scheme that the Kirchner government had put together in the media: that of Cristóbal, that of Electroingeniería, that of Szpolski, that of Santa María, Canal 7, Encuentro, UNTREF; what we used to call “the official propaganda apparatus.”

At the same time, it was fun to be in K environments and say, “I work with Lanata,” because just as it could provoke rejection, it also provoked respect and, why not, fear.

Lanata said that there was a “Lanata” and a “Jorge” and that’s the one I miss the most. If you had a question, an idea, a problem or whatever, he was always there to listen and advise you. Or to say it out of the blue: “I really liked your columns ClarionNo matter how many times they said something like that to you, he said it to you: “Mom, I’m here.” Because Lanata has always been “the lighthouse”. That’s why I would still have cried if I hadn’t worked with him.

My relationship with Jorge changed one day when we were talking about our parents. He told me a beautiful thing that I would rather keep. It was as if we had crossed the line between work and life.

The project we were working on got canceled, something between him and me. But there is also hope to make it happen one day, to close the circle and keep it alive for a while longer.

How do you want to die, idiot?