The idea of charging the RAI license fee in the electricity bill is not new and has not been implemented so far due to serious technical and political difficulties. But even before tackling the technical issues, we need to ask ourselves whether the concept of "public service" still makes sense and what its characteristics are, or should be. Everything in the information sector is a public service, in the sense that in modern advanced and democratic societies the free circulation of information is a fundamental element to ensure the correct functioning of the system which is based on the vote of citizens who are adequately informed on the activities of the governors and generally of all those who hold political, administrative or economic power.
In this sense, a public service in TV is justified only if there is a lack of pluralism in the other means of information, or if the television medium is considered so powerful as to prohibit its management by private individuals and therefore it becomes mandatory to create a monopoly which must necessarily be managed in a super partes manner by Parliament and therefore enjoy funding from the community. In Italy today none of these conditions is still valid.
Information, also thanks to the arrival of the internet, is now widely available free of charge for all citizens who often also become producers of news. No one sets limits nor are possible influences on the part of political or economic powers. RAI's monopoly has long since fallen and there are three other large private operators producing news (plus many smaller ones) competing with each other. It is said that this process has led to a high quality TV, but that's another story.
The so-called public service of the RAI today takes the form of information parceled out among the main parties present in Parliament, with a prevailing weight of those in government. Beyond the good faith of many journalists and the efforts of some to maintain a high professional level, the fact is that the editorial structures and therefore the political lines of the main information channels are determined by the political forces. That in some cases the game fails and some transmissions get out of control, derives from the fact that politicians often do not understand anything about publishing and rely on people who are not very capable or who present themselves with a tunic who they then renounce or abandon to look for new landing places .
If this is the picture, why should we continue to finance RAI through the license fee? Bringing it into the bill then means granting RAI a very strong increase in revenues (from a minimum of 500 million to over one billion euros) just as the controversies are still alive on the efficiency of the use of money by this company which has an endless number of journalists and production and clerical personnel are on the payroll.
In reality, it is not RAI that needs more money, but the whole information sector is suffering from the collapse of advertising due to the long economic crisis and the drop in sales partly connected to the advent of the internet. And it is a worldwide phenomenon, not only in Italy. The consequence is that investigative journalism and quality journalism suffer because publishing companies are no longer able to bear the related costs. But it is precisely this journalism that creates aware and reasoning citizens who are the basis of the proper functioning of democracies.
Therefore, if good information is believed to be in the general interest, one does not see why politics should limit itself to financing RAI and why the old and outdated concept of public service should be used. If citizens understand that good information is primarily in their interest, then a small surcharge should be added to the Irpef and that it will serve to finance the whole sector to a certain extent without granting anachronistic privileges to RAI. On the contrary, the company in Viale Mazzini should be placed on strict spending limits and granted greater autonomy to its managers on promotions and hiring in order to avoid the unbridled clientelism of recent decades.
It will then be necessary to clarify how to finance the rest of the information without creating injustices, or worse, a host of profiteers who aim only to plunder public money. It's not easy given how the provisions for publishing have been managed so far, but it's not impossible if you are clear about the goals you want to pursue. In any case, if no satisfactory agreement is reached, then one will have to give up fiddling with the RAI license fee, avoid drowning it in electricity bills, and instead tend towards its abolition perhaps by gradually dismantling the public television giant, which passes for the largest company cultural heritage of the country, but which has made very little of culture, especially in recent decades.
