After our interview, several uneasy Italian journalists suggest I must find it rather odd to discover a TV editor who supports one side so strongly.
Not really, I've interviewed enough British newspaper editors for precisely the same reason: to get an intelligent informed, but partisan view.
That all broadcasters, even ones that don't harvest a licence fee, are legally bound to be impartial in the UK, but newspapers are not, could be seen as a cultural quirk.
But it means that no-one in Italy seriously strives for objectivity.
Journalists are still organised in a guild, set up by Mussolini to control the press.
Before you are allowed to write a single article, you first have to have a sponsor within the industry, and then pass an exam sat in Rome, using an old-fashioned typewriter.
If the big organisation representing mainstream Italian journalists doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the technology that has been dominant for the last 20 years, it's not surprising that some see the internet as a way around the dead hand of an old elite.
Beppe the blogger
I go to Genoa to meet the man behind a blog whose aim is to clear the current political class out of power.
Beppe Grillo's online comments were voted by Time Magazine's readers as the world's most interesting political blog.
Beppe Grillo is, I guess, in his fifties, a mass of wavy curls more salt than pepper and a neat beard framing his engagingly impish face.
An irrepressible performer with political clout, he's the organiser of a rally with a very direct message to Italy's political elite. It was called "F-Off day". It drew a crowd of 80,000.
What amounts to political censorship cost him his job in 1987. He is a standup comic, and was perhaps the most popular comedian on Italian TV.
But then he made a joke about the then ruling party, the Socialists, being corrupt. The show's host walked off stage, the doorman wouldn't look him in the eye and he never appeared on TV again, barred by both the state and Berlusconi's private empire.
Even after a massive bribery scandal brought about the collapse of the Socialist party, he didn't get his job back.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment