The Prime Minister has a particular idea of the press, her propensity to skip appointments and discussions with journalists is well known. It is therefore not surprising that in her particular defense of Gioventù Nazionale, she shows that she does not know what undercover journalism is and what its purpose is. In her bizarre vision of investigative journalism, undercover journalism is not foreseen, which in reality has existed since the mid-1800s and was born with a noble purpose: to uncover corruption in order to immediately change the conditions of the weakest.
Of course in Italy there is not such a solid tradition of this type of investigation, unlike in Anglo-Saxon countries where just yesterday an undercovered investigation was published. Channel4 on the former head of government Farage discovered to fill the current Sunak with racist epithets.
In November 2023, a German journalist dressed as a runner infiltrated a secret meeting between high-ranking members of Germany’s far-right AfD and Christian Democrat parties, revealing a “master plan” to expel millions of people from Germany.
But there is no shortage of examples in Italy either, even if it doesn’t interest Meloni to recall them. The president was already in politics when the term “minzolinism” was coined to indicate the working method of Augusto Minzolini, former senator of the Popolo delle Libertà and now editorialist of the Newspaper and of Rete4. Minzo, as he is still called, was a student of a well-known Espresso reporter, Guido Quaranta, who even disguised himself as a driver to sneak into DC meetings.
His scoops on Craxi were born on the toilet in the women’s bathroom of the PSI headquarters, from his disguises as a waiter, from the habit of following some politicians with the lights off (this is how he discovered D’Alema’s “tart pact”), from hidden microphones, from hiding places that he knew how to find in every place: he eavesdropped behind curtains, inside elevators, from closets. In ’94 he made a scoop very similar to today’s fanpage, pinching Cesare Previti while he sang Faccia nera. Only two years ago however, Lapresse recorded Berlusconi as he boasted of his relations with Putin at the height of the war in Ukraine. «I have re-established relations with President Putin a little, a little. In the sense that for my birthday he sent me twenty bottles of vodka and a very sweet letter. I replied to him with bottles of Lambrusco and an equally sweet letter. I was declared by him to be the first of his five true friends”, he said during a meeting with Forzista parliamentarians on the occasion of the elections of the group leaders. But Meloni today doesn’t remember and prefers to delegitimize journalistic work again.
The editorial staff of fanpage yesterday he responded to the prime minister’s statements point by point. He recalled the previous investigations into the PD membership as well as those into the UGL, he refuted that he had hired investigators, as was instead claimed by Meloni who still can’t believe that there are some newspapers in Italy that don’t stop at the government’s showgirls. A few years ago, in the golden era of social media, he had a very successful satirical page called “The victimism of comrades”. A prophetic page, with hindsight, given that victimhood has now become a method of government and relations with what remains of the free press. Exemplary in this sense was a few months ago Minister Roccella who spoke to unified censorship networks for the protest of a small group of 15 year olds. Today she is the head of government who has risen to the next level, «infiltrating political party meetings is regime-like», she said.
