It's a classic case of going from right to wrong. The responses of journalists and commentators to the attacks by Matteo Renzi and a certain hon Anzaldi on television information (and not only) have been countered with arguments that demonstrate that journalists have now lost the memory of the ABC of the trade, confuse the pears with apples, and end up agreeing with those who criticize the information system, albeit in a wrong and dangerous way.
Yesterday evening Massimo Giannini, conductor of Ballarò, began the broadcast with an editorial in which he harshly criticized the recent enabling law approved by Parliament to regulate the publication on the media of telephone interceptions ordered by the judiciary. The aim is to prevent people who have nothing to do with the alleged crimes under investigation, and against whom there is no initiation of any judicial proceeding, from being pilloried through the publication of their sentences or of their silences (as happened recently to the Sicilian Governor Crocetta).
It is a simple need for civilization which has been neglected for too long and which has also allowed some judiciaries to replace the debate in the courtrooms with a real media trial. Well, how did Giannini tackle the subject? By saying that the public has a right to know certain secrets of the powerful. Had this law been in force – argued Giannini – the public would not have been able to read the exhilarating phone calls that preceded or followed Berlusconi's "elegant dinners", or the conversations between the then minister Cancellieri and the Ligresti family, or, finally , the gossip between the fixer Incalza (but what a fixer, he was a senior executive of the Ministry of Public Works) and Minister Lupi who was later forced to resign.
Well, apart from the elegant dinners that led to a trial based however on other elements and not so much on the spicier interceptions, in the other cases no crime was identified linked to those interceptions demonstrating that they were acts not pertinent to the investigations then in progress. Incalza was arrested, but not for telephone calls with Minister Lupi, but on the basis of other clues. Considering therefore that in many cases the publication of interceptions has no connection with judicial proceedings, Giannini confuses the right of the public to be informed and the work of the journalist who cannot be based on the search for the truth with telephone spying which is prohibited unless that is not explicitly authorized by a judge. The role of the journalist is not to do the post in front of the magistrates' room, or worse than the various "services", but to make inquiries, to hear the people involved, to sift through the balance sheets and to nail the powerful on duty to the their responsibility. And in fact, for example, the scandal of the "elegant dinners" came to light before the interceptions, from an interview of La Repubblica with an escort from Bari.
Even more bizarre is the thesis of Antonio Polito who tries to defend Tg3 from the attacks (actually a bit vulgar) by the Renzians, stating that the audience of the Third Rai network wants to know what is wrong with the country and certainly not the real successes or presumed government, even if this is chaired by the secretary of the PD. But the problem lies in the fact that the things that are wrong, and there are certainly many, do not come from the opinions repeatedly expressed by the opposition within the PD or by external ones, but from serious investigations by journalists, from services capable of describing the reality and the successes or failures of the Government to change it. Repeatedly making opponents speak only means emphasizing opinions different from those of the Government, opinions that can be just as far from reality as those of the ministers on duty.
Once again, therefore, it is a question of journalistic professionalism and the ethics of information professionals who must be "third parties" with respect to power and not mere transmission belts, linked to this or that political group. Even Renzi is wrong to attack journalists directly. When he was the scrap he had promised to free RAI from the suffocating weight of the parties. But now if he behaves like all previous politicians, he enters into a serious contradiction and demonstrates that he too wants information subservient to power and not free journalism at the service of citizens.
