On Saturday, Ricard Ustrell interviewed Susanna Griso in Collapse. TV3 had already been promoting it for days, announcing that the presenter would talk to "the Catalan journalist Susanna Griso". The desire to emphasise her Catalanness was striking. Would this adjective also be added if Raquel Sans or Antoni Bassas were interviewed? If the fact of working in Madrid is what determines the need to specify the Catalanness of an interviewee, would it be necessary to emphasise "the Catalan journalist Carles Francino" or "the Catalan journalist Àngels Barceló"? In the interview in Sala i Martín he was not announced as "the Catalan economist", Joan Pera as "the Catalan actor" or Rosario Flores as "the singer from Madrid" or Spanish. Adding this nuance to Susanna Griso, when the TV3 audience knows perfectly well that she is Catalan, denoted a need to reinforce her origins, as if she were being given back an assumed identity, almost as if it were a decoration.
This inertia was repeated in the interview with Ustrell, where the human side of the protagonist was explored with a cup of tea at the side to ensure dialectical warmth. They talked about Griso's professional career, the family context in which she grew up and her journalistic interests. Ustrell stressed that the journalist's children had Catalan names and even a sign appeared on the screen, as a headline, highlighting a response from the journalist: "We have always spoken Catalan at home." It caused a certain perplexity. A natural or rather obvious circumstance became a kind of heroism. Having to highlight the familiar use of Catalan by someone who was born, raised and studied in Catalonia, who began her career at Catalunya Ràdio, who we saw working at TV3, just because she now lives in Madrid and works at Antena 3, is unheard of. Ustrell seemed to justify the journalist before the audience, insisting on her Catalan, as if she had to make up for her feat. It was precisely because of her Catalan roots, her knowledge of the language, the educational system, the media and the country that her news approaches have often generated confusion, incomprehension and indignation. Because she knew what reality was like in relation to many of the absurdities that were said about Catalonia at the table of her program. Griso explained the enormous emotional and family difficulties during the Trial, but she was not asked about the news biases, some of them really scandalous, and the journalistic manipulations ofPublic mirror regarding Catalonia. It placed the journalist in the fictional universe of innocent equidistance, as a victim of the Process. The difficulties in obtaining the interview forced the guest not to be questioned or asked about the journalistic approaches ofPublic mirror of dubious ethics and rigor. These interviews of a human nature have more public relations among the interested parties than journalism.
