At the end of March the journalist Alessandra De Stefano resigned as director of Rai Sport, a position she had assumed in November 2021 and whose mandate would expire in 2024. On Friday in an interview with Republic he told the reasons behind this choice, speaking extensively of the difficulties he had in trying to change the traditional approach of Rai, in the reporting of sport and more generally in journalism.
One reason above all: the difficulty in accepting that something cannot be changed. In Rai, if you try to make a different choice, you immediately become an enemy. I like to try, I think that sometimes it’s not bad to take another path. It may be wrong or right, but it’s a try. The problem is that there are colleagues who still tell you: I made a share. No, you didn’t do the listening, but the event you attended. And if you try to change a face there are those who feel exiled, everyone feels fundamental, the word replacement doesn’t exist.
De Stefano, who in the meantime has been appointed as the new Rai correspondent from Paris, had been the first director of Rai Sport. A few months before your nomination you had conducted a program on the Tokyo Olympics which had had great success with the public and critics, The Circle of ringsin which she had recounted the Olympic competitions accompanied by former athletes Jury Chechi and Sara Simeoni, sometimes with light-hearted and light-hearted tones.
De Stefano had tried to revive that format for the World Cup in Qatar last year, but the program had been less successful also due to the absence of the Italian national team, and De Stefano had received a lot of criticism for this. After the first episode he had answered in a very harsh way on Twitter to those who had criticized her.
In the interview with Republic he also talks about the decision to entrust a columnist role in the Sports Sunday to Lia Capizzi, former Sky Sport journalist. In recent months, rumors had circulated in many newspapers, which as such should be taken with caution, according to which the choice to hire an external columnist would have irritated several Rai Sport journalists.
De Stefano vindicated this choice, as well as that of giving less space to the football championship in the program, of which Rai no longer has the rights: «I believe in an authorial TV, but on Sundays there is a lot of current events, you have to make connections quickly, create a narrative, you need good authors but they have to be paid and maybe five years for a new mentality. We tried to deconstruct football.”
De Stefano also recounted that among the reasons that prompted her to resign was the case of the journalist Enrico Varriale: in October 2021 he had been suspended by Rai as a precaution due to an ongoing trial against him for stalking and persecutory acts against the ex partner.
Varriale had recently turned to a labor judge to ask to return to host a program on Rai. The judge has yet to comment on the matter, and De Stefano said that any reinstatement would have been a source of embarrassment for her. “I didn’t feel like a woman,” she said. «I would have become the female director who put it back on video, pending the court ruling. It wasn’t just my personal feeling, there was also unease in the company and among those who should have worked with him».