After months of tension between the unions of the Italian public radio and television station, Rai, and the Executive led by Giorgia Meloni, the network's journalists are carrying out a 24-hour strike this Monday to denounce the "suffocating" control over the journalistic work of the public media with the intention of turning them into a “government megaphone.”
“This strike goes beyond Rai, there is a problem with press freedom in Italy,” said Daniele Macheda, the secretary of Rai's main union, Usigrai. “Things have happened recently that do not allow us to be optimistic about how things will go in Italy,” he added, in a press conference.
The last straw was the controversial censorship of a monologue by the writer Antonio Scurati, author of a successful trilogy about the dictator Benito Mussolini, where he accused the prime minister's party, Brothers of Italy, of being a post-fascist formation. But union representatives have given other examples of the growing pressure from the Executive on public channels. For example, they point out that, when the Minister of Agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida – brother-in-law of the prime minister – stopped a train halfway because he was late for an event and wanted to finish the journey by car, Rai was one of the last media outlets. in explaining it.
They also regret the prime minister's criticism of a Rai investigative program that questioned how public funds are used in the migrant centers being built in Albania, which Meloni said was a “lynching” of the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama. . “And not only this, every day there is a hand-to-hand fight between journalists and managers to fight for specific words about how things that have to do with the majority are told,” Macheda tells La Vanguardia. For all these reasons, the opposition has already baptized Rai as “Telemeloni”. Several star presenters have jumped ship.
The strike was declared for 24 hours, although the follow-up is being uneven. The Usigrai union is the majority, representing some 2,000 of the group's workers, but another union, Unirai, close to the Government, has fought to maintain news programming. The 24-hour channel, Rainews24, is suffering and has to broadcast canned images, but the midday news programs on the main channels have been broadcast, although with difficulties. The broadcast of the Giro d'Italia cycling event is taking place without commentators. “Very few people have gone to work, and the connections have been unusually long to disguise,” Macheda defended.
The media climate in Italy is very tense, especially after the latest Reporters Without Borders report on press freedom, in which Italy has fallen from 41st to 46th place among 180 countries analyzed because, according to the text, there are political parties that seek “take control of the media ecosystem, both through state media under its control and through private media.” RSF especially cites the worrying case of the possible sale of AGI, the country's second news agency, to the media conglomerate of Antonio Angelucci, a businessman with important interests in health and tourism, who already has three newspapers aligned with the ideology of the Government and is also a deputy of the League, one of the parties of the government majority.
The potential conflict of interest is delicate because the current owner is the energy company ENI, controlled by the Italian State. The Ministry of Economy is the main shareholder of the company with more than 30% of the shares, and currently the Minister of Economy is the league player Giancarlo Giorgetti. It all happens in the cradle of the Mediaset empire, owned by the Berlusconi family – which also has Forza Italia, the other government political party.
“Italy has entered the problematic zone and now we are next to Viktor Orbán's Hungary,” denounced, at the press conference, Vittorio de Trapani, RAI reporter and president of the National Federation of the Italian Press (FNSI).
