With the definitive go-ahead from the Parliamentary Supervisory Commission, Monica Maggioni, director of Rai News and long-standing international correspondent, is the new president of Rai. You have indicated it to the Renzi government through the shareholder Tesoro which has also designated Marco Fortis as the new board member.
The Rai shareholders' meeting yesterday afternoon ratified the appointments and in the evening the Parliamentary Supervisory Commission on Rai with 29 votes in favor (the quorum of 2/3 was 27) and five blank ballots definitively gave its go-ahead at the new summits of public television.
The television manager Antonio Campo Dall'Orto, former director of MTV, is instead the probable new general manager, destined after the reform to become CEO of the company with full powers, barring final twists and turns.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed satisfaction and called the one appointed to lead Rai "a nice board".
However, it is noticeable how compared to the rarity of managers (only Carlo Freccero and perhaps Campo Dall'Orto) there is a plethora of journalists. One of the criticisms that recur on the new appointments is once again that of party subdivision: a fair but trivial criticism, given that the Renzi government erroneously decided to override the obstructionism of the opposition on the reform to renew the top management through the bad Gasparri law, which in addition to strengthening Berlusconi's pole, it was and remains the antechamber of subdivision, assigning the parliamentary supervisory commission the task of indicating 7 of the 9 members of the RAI board of directors.
Among other things, four of the 9 new directors (Freccero, Diaconale, Guelfi and Mazzuca) are retired and, due to the reform of the PA, will be able to remain in office for only one year and will not be able to be paid.
Allotment is certainly a fault because Rai does not belong to the parties but to the citizens who pay taxes and fees but moralisms leave the time they find. Conversely, the division could only be avoided in three ways: either by appointing directors of the highest and undisputed professionalism or by changing the mechanism of appointments or by privatizing at least two of the three Rai channels. The serious problem is when it is not only parceled out but done with mediocre figures, with some rare exceptions.
As for the political aspects of the story, at least two deserve to be highlighted: 1) for the first time Beppe Grillo also decides to "get his hands dirty" and to allocate parcels without retreating to the Aventine Hill, appointing Carlo Freccero as RAI director; 2) without the support of Silvio Berlusconi, Renzi would not have had the numbers to pass the appointments at the top of Rai to the Supervisory Commission, because two thirds of the members are needed. And this time the Renzi-Berlusconi deal worked.
