Jesús de Polanco:At the height of Jesús de Polanco's power in the 1980s, El Paíswas such an influential newspaper that Felipe González, then prime minister, banned its reading before cabinet meetings lest his ministers be unduly swayed by what the newspaper had to say that day.
Polanco, publisher of El Paísand chairman of Grupo Prisa, the largest media group in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Saturday at the age of 77. He was Spain's Citizen Kane - a hard-nosed businessman who understood that Spain, at the end of the Franco dictatorship, was hungry for modern journalism.
He played a key role in Spain's transition to democracy - so much so that it is now impossible to imagine those tentative years after the death of Franco without the taciturn, self-made businessman who believed passionately in a free press.
Polanco was convinced that Spain was ready for an independent newspaper that would write clearly and succinctly and would adopt progressive views on social issues, such as divorce and contraception - both forbidden under Franco.
Although he was born into a comfortably-off middle-class family in Madrid, Mr Polanco chose to start his working life as a travelling encyclopaedia salesman.
In 1960 he founded Santillana, a publisher of school textbooks, which is now the biggest in Spain and Latin America. The success of El País, which sells more than 400,000 copies a day, encouraged Polanco to build a broader media empire. Cadena Ser, now the largest radio network in Spain, was launched in the late 1980s.
El Paísnever hid its sympathies with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Those ties hurt the newspaper in the early 1990s, when it failed to investigate a scandal linking death squads to a covert operation run by the government to eliminate armed Basque separatists.
Jesús de Polanco: Born 1929, died July 21st, 2007.