Matias Prats

On the 11 of September, 2001, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, nobody in a newsroom knew what to say. Matías Prats sat down in the studio in San Sebastián de los Reyes and held more than seven consecutive hours of live coverage while two planes brought down the Twin Towers. No teleprompter. Cables all over the floor and teletype machines spitting out paper. That afternoon he set the rules for how to report a catastrophe without losing your composure.

Anyone would assume reaching that level of coolness required a carefully planned strategy. The reality was far more down to earth. Matías Prats Luque carried the shadow of the No-Do newsreel voice and took years to shake off that suspicion.

The Weight of a Famous Surname and Years in the Trenches

In 1975, he joined Televisión Española thanks to an unexpected fill-in on Redacción de Noche. He wasn't the fastest reporter in the newsroom, nor the one who wrote with the most flair. But he knew how to stand in front of a spotlight without blinking.

He spent nearly two decades in the sports department covering World Cups and Olympic Games. He was in Los Angeles in 1984 and in Barcelona in 1992, glued to the sidelines of the stadiums. There he learned to master silence. In sports commentary, a mistake cannot be edited out beforehand, and viewers can smell doubt from miles away.

Nobody gave a dime for his move into general news.

In 1991, he took the decisive step toward the first edition of the Telediario. The public network's management was wary of putting a sports man in charge of national political news. Matías took his seat at the desk with a flat, understated tone, avoiding the solemn posturing that dominated screens at the time.

The Table-Pounding Moment of 1998

In July 1998, Antena 3 put a blank check on the table to sign him along with an entire news team. Private television wanted credibility at any cost. TVE lost its most trusted face overnight.

And the move paid off right from the first broadcast.

In San Sebastián de los Reyes, he found a freedom of form that public television would never have tolerated. He was in a relationship with Susanna Griso and later with Olga Viza. During this period, he developed a personal style in which hard news coexisted with a light touch of irony before handing off to commercial breaks.

Because the real key to his longevity never lay in flashy moves. It lay in his pacing. He separated sentences with two-second pauses. He lowered his chin, looked over his glasses, and closed with a dry remark that threw the director off balance.

Endurance on the Weekend

In September 2014, the network's management decided to move him to the weekend newscast alongside Mónica Carrillo. In commercial networks, such a move is often a disguised retirement. Few journalists survive a change of time slot without losing their relevance.

Prats did the exact opposite. He turned the Saturday and Sunday editions into the most-watched news program on Spanish television for years on end. He covered dense politics in twenty minutes and saved the final segment for his well-known wordplay. Those deliberately terrible jokes broke the rigid conventions of the traditional news format.

In 2019, he surpassed the milestone of ten thousand news broadcasts presented on free-to-air television. No other anchor in Europe reached similar numbers in front of a camera.

In 2021, he suffered a detached retina, which kept him off set for three months before he returned to the spotlight wearing dark glasses. His contract with Atresmedia was renewed in 2024, keeping him on screen until he turned 75.