Mediapro: Journalist and Businessman
Benet began his professional career in 1975 at El Diario de Lleida as a local news and sports editor. In December 1976 he moved to Barcelona to participate in the launch of the newspaper Catalunya Express as a reporter for the Sports section.
In June 1977 he returned to Lleida as a correspondent for the national newspaper El País and from November 1978 as a delegate for El Periódico de Catalunya.In September 1980, Tatxo made what would be his definitive move to Barcelona to work at El Periódico as editor of Les Coses de la Vida, being appointed editor-in-chief of the section in the spring of 1982.
In September 1983, he joined the founding team of TV3-Televísió de Catalunya as head of the Catalonia section of the Information Department. It was here that Tatxo met Jaume Roures and Gerard Romy for the first time. In January 1984, when TV3 began broadcasting regularly, Tatxo was appointed director of news assignments.
Since then, and during the following fifteen years until 1997, Tatxo Benet was responsible for several areas and held several managerial positions at Televisió de Catalunya.He presented and directed the news section of several newscasts, and directed and presented the magazine Tothom por tomto.In June 1987, Tatxo was appointed Head of the Sports Department, a position he held for almost ten years, until September 1996.
During the period he was Head of Sports, and together with Jaume Roures, TV3 acquired the rights and exclusive broadcasts in Catalonia. for the Spanish League and the Copa del Rey, the UEFA Champions League, Wimbledon and the US Open tennis tournaments, the four Grand Slam golf tournaments: British Open, US Open, Augusta Masters and USPGA, as well as many other tournaments of high-level Spanish and international competitions, breaking the monopoly held by Televisió Española Española until now. During this period, the look and content of sports programming underwent significant modernization, as did the way the networks used different sports footage and images. In fact, TV3's Channel 33 soon transformed into a sports channel given the quality and volume of broadcasts and sports programs that the channel presented, especially on weekends.
During the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, Tatxo was appointed director and head of the Olympic Channel, broadcasting the games in Catalan 24 hours a day.
With the creation of FORTA, the Federation of Autonomous Radio and Television Organizations, which brings together all the autonomous TV and radio channels in Spain, Tatxo was appointed Coordinator and Head of the Sports Division.
In January 1997, Tatxo moved to Madrid and was appointed Director General of Audiovisual Sport, a company in which Sogecable (40%), Antonio Asensio (40%) and Televisió de Catalunya (20%) participate, which was born for the commercialization of means rights of the Spanish Football League.Collection and patronage of contemporary artIn February 2018 he started his contemporary art collection, which he has titled "Censored". It consists of more than seventy works of art that were censored at some point in history.
The collection includes works by Abel Azcona, Ai Weiwei, Francisco de Goya, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.In February 2018, shortly before his retirement from Arc, Tatxo Benet acquired the piece Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain by Santiago Sierra. Outraged by what he considers "an intolerable act of censorship", he made the piece available to anyone who wants to exhibit it, with the Museum of Lleida being his first destination, and from where the works of the Monastery of Sixena. The work has been shown in more than thirty cities in Catalonia and Spain, and in several European countries.
One of the most important pieces in Tatxo Benet's Contemporary Art collection is Amen or La Pederàstia by Abel Azcona, which was censored and persecuted by the Catholic Church, as well as Piss Christ by Andrés Serrano and photographs by Ai Weiwei, which are considered some of the most recognized censored artworks in art history.
In January 2020, Benet purchased a nude, feminized painting by Mexican revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata, La Revolución de Fabián Chairez. Descendants of Zapata sued Cháirez for defamation after the painting was displayed at the Palau de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The painting will be brought to Catalonia to be exhibited together with 25 more controversial paintings from the Benet collection.In 2019 Tatxo acquires the Ona bookstore in Montse Úbeda.
