Paolo Vasile defends Sálvame a week from its controversial end: “It will be reviewed in the future”

The death of Silvio Berlusconi is the perch that has brought out of the burrow of his retirement to Paul Vasilywhich fills with compliments in an interview granted to the digital Pedro J. Ramírez the memory of the man who made him a millionaire and powerful, and to whom the Roman, now retired, gave decades of work and billions of benefits.

But beyond the tribute to his admired mentor, Vasile gives some clues about the situation of the audiovisual giant that he abandoned on January 1 and that has been drifting ever since. Vasile left the network after losing audiences in favor of Atresmedia but after the departure of the businessman the situation has worsened: a new television model has not yet been outlined that gives options to recover leadership and to top it off, Mediaset lives a declared war in between Alessandro Salem, the CEO, top manager and first Executive of the company, and the president Borja Prado, relegated to strictly institutional tasks and the target of an offensive from its own chain, no longer so underground. Vasile does not enter into these controversies and therefore does not refer to the terrible confrontation that he himself had with Borja Prado before the relay. It does talk about the end of Save mewhich coincidentally arrives on the day that Paolo Vasile turns 70, on Friday, June 23.

“Calling something that people like trash TV is offending the public,” says the once almighty CEO of Mediaset in statements to The Spanish. “It is not polite to talk about trash TV. It is very offensive to talk about trash when it consists of something that people spend so much time on,” argues the predecessor of Alessandro Salem.

“It seems very stupid to me,” he stresses, to later coin one of his well-known maxims: “There are only two kinds of television: the one that people see and the one that people do not see,” he repeats. Vasile, in the interview granted to the journalist Daniel Ramirez, praises the late Berlusconi, as he always did when his boss was still alive, and predicts that The death of the tycoon will not change the course of Mediaset: “Since he entered politics, he has remained on the sidelines. He is not going to influence,” he says. Asked about the commented end of Save me, defends his legacy: “It will be reviewed in the future,” he predicts. “Some things are undervalued in the present and become important over time. All mass phenomena have a reason”, reasons the former director who spent more than two decades at the helm of Berlusconi’s subsidiary in Spain. Vasile explains the triumph of the television model that he implemented (a lot of heart and reality TV) because Spain (like Italy) is a country with a Catholic culture: “People of a Catholic culture like suffering, forgiveness and the forbidden,” he argues, and justifies the scarcity of political programs on a chain that was owned by a former prime minister: ” People don’t care that much,” he says. “I’m sure people don’t care about politics all year. It is a specific interest, which appears, for example, with the elections or with big changes. People are passionate about competition, conflict, love, or hate. When politics is that, it matters. But you shouldn’t institutionalize boredom,” he says. “TV should talk about politics when it matters, not all the time. Now, in Spain, it is an interesting moment for politics”, he remarks.