MILAN. The “intransigence” during the pandemic in defense of “vaccines, green passes and lockdowns from all the superstitions and anti-scientific impulses that have exploded on the web”. The “strict line” followed in the war in Ukraine “sincerely recounting Putin’s crimes, but always re-launching the path of peace”. The “rigorously” defense of citizens’ right to information “making sure that any news that may be of public interest is transmitted with respect for the truth and with the greatest accuracy of the sources”. And again: the civil commitment with the collection of 300,000 signatures for the appeal for the Iranian government to release Fahimeh Karimi, the volleyball coach and mother of three small children detained and sentenced to death, a symbol of the regime’s oppression ayatollah on women. They are among the reasons for the “Montale Out of Home Award” for the Journalism section – Directors of newspapers presented yesterday by the president Adriana Beverini to Massimo Giannini. «An acknowledgment – says the director of this newspaper – to the work of all the journalists and collaborators of the The print, because the newspaper is a living and above all collective work. It accompanies us throughout our days, it is the secular Hegelian prayer in the morning, but we stop briefly to think about how much, for such a small price, we offer our community of readers every day: 40 pages and more, the result of the immense work of so many people , in a relevant exercise of passion and effort of thought».
[[(gele.Finegil.Image2014v1) onecms:ee367eb9-bb6f-4b8b-ad75-f70a6061b01a]]
And an award like the one dedicated to the versatile intellectual, poet but also critic and journalist – in the past going to directors such as Paolo Mieli, Ferruccio de Bortoli, Luciano Fontana and Marco Tarquinio – inevitably leads to the debate on today’s journalism, in which the truth, more and more often, as noted by Mariangela Guandalini, the Prize’s cultural consultant during the public interview with Giannini at the Sormani Library in Milan, it often appears distorted or manipulated depending on who writes it. «It is a problem on the one hand of the economic and above all political power which has always tried to manipulate information: we see it today with Rai, we have seen it in the past. But on the other it is also the problem of a journalism that too often lets itself be manipulated», replies Giannini. The category cannot be free from criticism: “As politics has accentuated the profiles of radicalization in Italy over time from a bipolar perspective, we increasingly find journalists who decide not to place themselves in the middle of the field to understand and tell with facts what which happens, but which take place in the curves: some on the right, some on the left. A huge mistake to which many colleagues have lent themselves and which has contributed to delegitimizing the role of us journalists, no longer interpreted as instruments of mediation between the reader and the power, but become players ». And this, she says, “is the disease of journalism: it harms the profession and affects the quality of democracy”. Politics is divided, the truth is increasingly questionable, information risks losing its authority. “All of this makes serious and responsible journalism more necessary than ever today.”
A problem that exists in Italy but involves countries where the rate of authoritarianism of governments is increasing, without excluding the West. “We have seen Trump in the United States, we see Orban in Hungary, Morawiecki in Poland, not to mention Erdogan in Turkey. The first thing anyone who goes into government does is buy or close televisions, buy or close newspapers. Let’s not talk about the precariousness from which even journalism is not exempt, which “in the future runs the risk of transforming journalists into new slaves, even of power”. And over time more or less strong powers have learned how to raise the pressure on information. «Once upon a time, the journalist who criticized this or that potentate received a lawsuit for defamation, he defended himself and almost never went to jail. Today the power has understood that above all the weakest groups, those who have less broad shoulders, are more vulnerable and susceptible to being faced with a civil suit, with abnormal requests for compensation for damages. In the face of which publishers with less means are sometimes forced to call the directors, inviting them to call the reporters to calm down on this or that story. It’s a mortal danger.” Which brings the discussion to the relationship between editors and publishers. «I have no qualms about talking about it also because if I can’t work in the right conditions, I leave peacefully. And I can say I’m lucky. TO Republic, where I spent 34 years of my working life, I first had a publisher-director-master like Eugenio Scalfari who was later joined by Carlo De Benedetti, who had extensive interests but always respected the iron pact signed with Scalfari: never something was asked of me. At the Press, where on 24 April I celebrated 3 years of direction, we often talk to John Elkann and meet regularly. But he never uttered a single word to condition me. I’m lucky. But I think I know how to deserve the respect of those who pay me my salary on the pitch.”