The Prince of Asturias Foundation
EFE Agency
The award to the EFE Agency aims to acknowledge the work of various generations of communications professionals who have managed to make it into one of the big five world-wide information agencies, and the premier Spanish language agency. A highly-important communications link between Spain and Latin America, and between the various Spanish-speaking countries, in 1995 it has expanded its services, setting up a news service in Arabic. The jury has decided that this prize should be shared by the Spanish philosopher José Luis López Aranguren, one of the Spanish thinkers who has re-injected most vigour into philosophy and who has best known how to transmit it.
With little more than half a century behind it, the EFE Agency has its own editorial offices in the major capitals of the world and in each and every European and American country. According to a study by the Latin-American Institute of Trans-national Studies, EFE has reached in recent years the top place in the supply of information to the Latin-American community, with 21.7 percent of the total, above AP and Reuters. In Spain, the average amount of agency information published by a daily newspaper amounts to 65.7 percent of the total, of which 69.6 percent corresponds to EFE.
As well as these services, the Agency has developed one of the few public access databases in Spain (EFE-DATA) and it also makes news programmes for radio and television, which are currently distributed and broadcast in Spain and Latin America. The EFE Agency also maintains strict vigilance over the correct use of the Spanish language, with a team of philologists who daily watch over purity of style and linguistic unity, and inform different departments of the infractions detected. This is the only permanent telephone consultation service in the Spanish-speaking world, and has published a "Handbook of Effective Spanish", and various guides to good style, used by numerous communications media.
José Luis López Aranguren
José Luis López Aranguren (Ávila, June 1909) is a graduate in Law and a Doctor of Philosophy and Arts from the University of Madrid. Retired Professor of Ethics and Sociology, he is one of the most highly-regarded philosophers in Spanish society, due to his critical and rigorous character and his great capacity for both communication and work. Forced away from Spanish universities for ten years for political reasons (together with Tierno Galván and García Calvo), he was re-instated by the amnesty of 1976 and retired in 1980. At times in his life he has been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Texas, Indiana and California (USA) and at the Danish University of Aarhus. He has, furthermore, been emeritus professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara and has lectured in various North American, French, English, German and Italian universities.
An assiduous contributor to the Spanish daily press, he has written a great number of essays, which began with "La filosofía de Eugenio d`Ors", and among which, we may single out titles such as "Ética y política" or "La comunicación humana." Last year, the publication of his Complete Works commenced. A finalist for the National Essay Prize in 1979, he was awarded the National Literature Prize in 1989. Among the many distinctions bestowed upon him, José Luis López Aranguren has received the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise, the Gold Medal of Sant Jordi and the Gold Medal of the Region of Madrid. Furthermore, he is a doctor honoris causa of the Carlos III University in Madrid.
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