Rome has been wallpapered for days with blue posters showing a caricature of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and an arm raised in the Roman salute. “Turn off the Rai [la principal cadena pública italiana de televisión]”Don’t you see that fascism is already here?” It is one more example of the unrest that runs through the sets where public information is produced, harassed, according to the journalists themselves, by the Government. “We have never experienced a situation like this. Not even in Berlusconi’s time. Censorship manifests itself on a daily basis,” explains Enrica Agostini, a veteran journalist at Rai News 24, the public continuous information channel. Last Monday, the majority of employees decided to go on strike in an unusual protest that some chains of the public entity managed to overcome thanks to the boycott of a small union linked to the right that the management has just created. Next Thursday, May 16, journalists want to take to the streets of Rome to denounce “the threat to press freedom posed by the Meloni Government.”
The paradigm shift, reported by Rai journalists consulted by this newspaper, has been more aggressive than in any previous era. Employees complain that there is no longer any space for plurality in the chain and that they often suffer pressure to focus their information differently. The fight for control of the media in Italy is not new and found its peak with Silvio Berlusconi in power, owner of Mediaset. However, even then, public broadcasters were divided between parties in what was known as the lottizzazione, a kind of historical distribution of the channels, born in times of the Christian Democracy and the Communist Party. Today, they complain, that pact no longer exists and the entire public communication flow is dominated by the right-wing narrative. “Has become Telemeloniand it is something extremely shameless that begins from the moment you walk through the door until the piece you have worked on is broadcast,” says a TG1 journalist who requires anonymity to speak.
Agostini, who belongs to the majority union, speaks openly about what he considers cases of censorship. “Censorship manifests itself in politics every day. They control the words we can use in the pieces. I am a resister, I have been here for many years and I have a union role: they are more careful with me. But they do it with everyone and it is an everyday thing. People remove their signature from the pieces because they only emit propaganda. I have been reporting on politics for 20 years, it has never been like this, we have never hidden news. And it’s ridiculous, because then they appear somewhere else and people realize what we’re doing,” he says into the phone. “When they manipulate your news, they try to negotiate it with you, of course. When I wrote about the minimum wage, for example, I said that the Government had killed the idea. My boss told me: ‘that seems like a personal judgment.’ I replied that it was just reality. But the censorship, in my case, for example, is that they no longer let me follow the Government’s affairs. And some of us can’t write about the right,” he insists.
Roberto Sergio is the new CEO, presumably only until the year of his predecessor’s remaining term ends and Giampaolo Rossi, the prime minister’s trusted man, can be appointed. When he received the assignment he sent a letter to the employees saying that a new “storytelling of the nation.” That is, another narrative, another way of telling the story. An obvious message of the change of course.
Rossi—at the moment he is general director waiting for a full term to begin in a year—has a lot of weight as well, and it is not just any profile. He is one of the organizers of Atreju, the cultural congress of Brothers of Italy, deeply ideologized, worked intellectually and with undeniable tendencies. philoputinian. Rossi represents better than anyone that will to build a story of Italy—and the world—that fits within the ideological perimeter of the right. He arrives from the hand of two other old acquaintances: Paolo Corsini and Angelo Mellone (journalist and essayist on that ideological spectrum).
A major scandal
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That storytelling of the nation, which the right considers was taken away from them for many years by the left from the sets and the cultural industry, it does not happen because the prime minister can receive criticism from intellectuals on the air. And that was the case that sparked all the protests. Three weeks ago, the Rai 3 program Chè Sara which Serena Bertone presents had commissioned a monologue from the writer Antonio Scurati to commemorate April 25, Liberation Day from Italian fascism. Scurati, author of the three volumes of Mussolini’s exciting biography, wrote a historical text, but critical of Meloni’s Government and herself (he said, among other things, that Meloni comes from a “neofascist” culture and that his Executive has not disassociated itself from the crimes committed during the Mussolini regime). When the document passed management review, without any explanation, the contract was cancelled. The scandal was huge and even Meloni herself intervened to say that it had been due to a question of money, that what was going to be paid to Scurati was too much (1,500 euros gross).
Bertone read the monologue on the program and denounced the situation. And for this reason, the Rai has opened a disciplinary file against her and she has preferred to decline the possibility of speaking with this newspaper. However, sources close to the case assure that the money excuse put forward by Rai does not hold up because they are the usual rates. Daniel Macheda, secretary of Usigrai, a workers’ union, denounces to this newspaper the policy of retaliation that the chain is using against critical voices. “What is happening, including the announcement of the opening of the disciplinary file for Serena Bortone, only aggravates the situation. Something is brewing whose result we will see little by little and that is disturbing. What happened with Scurati, for example, could not be resolved with a disciplinary file. He does not clarify what happened and only accuses the colleague,” he points out.
The chain’s management has just created a new, completely minority union with an ideological allegiance to the right to prepare for the battle. The Government considers that for years the positions of the right were marginalized and that it is time to put an end to that situation. Even if an internal fight has to be opened that undermines the prestige of the chain. Macheda assures that he does not understand “what balance they are talking about.” “I had never seen anything like it. Rai has always had party interference, we have always denounced it as a union. And we will continue doing it. But the presence of the parties had always been well distributed. Today it is not like that. The other day we broadcast 46 minutes of a speech by Meloni, including applause. And we are in an electoral campaign! ”He protests.
The Rai problem adds to several ongoing operations of the Executive to expand the spectrum of related media. The latest case is that of the possible sale of Agi, the country’s second news agency, to a League deputy. Antonio Angelucci, the parliamentarian with the most abstentionism, with the most cases of non-appearance in sessions (almost 99%), is a health businessman who also owns three newspapers linked to the right. The agency, currently owned by the energy company Eni (35% owned by the State). That is to say, the Ministry of Economy is the majority shareholder of the company, which must decide the sale of a key piece of Italian information to a League deputy who has already more than demonstrated his closeness to Meloni in his media reports. . If the operation is consummated, the country’s journalists’ unions believe, the Government will have accumulated unprecedented media influence.
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