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THE PRESS HAS LET THE COUNTRY DOWN

As an Italian man I am a little bit embarrassed. My country is that country where a single man owns and controls three private television stations, and also the three public ones, that controls as Prime Minister. Is that country where inconvenient journalists are drove out or emarginated and many others have to conform themselves. Is that country that propose as a member for the European Committee Rocco Buttiglione, a man that quietly says that gay people are “sinners”, that “homosexuality is a sign of moral disorder”, that women “have to stay at home giving birth to children”. And in Italy no one protests and treats him as the “fanatic extremist” that he is.
That’s why I feel embarrassed in talking about freedom of information in an international contest. Maybe Should I shut up and listen?
I’ve been working as a journalist for thirty years and for twenty years I worked in the State Television. That’s why I feel deeply moved in talking here where BBC, the first and most important public service of the world is born. In the Italian journalist trade union we always see BBC as a model of autonomy and objectivity that should inspire our RAI, afflicted by subordination of political parties.
A myth that went on till the summer of an year ago when, after the denounce of the falsity of the motivations gave by Blair and Bush for the war in Iraq, the BBC fell under the strokes of a Labourite Government. The alienation of Gilligan, the revelation of the name of Kelly and his suicide and the demission of the general manager, gave a strong stroke to the credibility and to the autonomy of the English State television. The BBC unmasked the Big Lay that is the origin of this ideological war (today also Bush and Blair admit it), but the assault against free press started and won’t stop.
Every war is also a propaganda war, a war of unofficial information and disinformation. We use to say that the first victim of the war is always the truth. But the first truth is that the pressure of big political and economical powers on media exploded with Enduring Freedom.
And here I want to denounce the risk that this trend to surrender of the media and the intellectual world, unwarlike against censorships and manipulations, could go on even after the wished victory of Kerry or other left-winged leaders. The authoritarian behavior of our democracies proposes models of government that foresee a strict control of the media and the substitution of the information with the communication of propaganda.
A signal of how BBC represented an objective of the big political strategies, is that a Laborite leader as Tony Blair was allied with newspapers as The Sun and with the most powerful and reactionary manager, Rupert Murdoch, even when he was elected.
And what about American newspapers, so autonomic that are considered real “institutions” that directly refers to The First Amendment of the Constitution, and that in the past they make a powerful President as Richard Nixon fallen. Today televisions and newspapers censor themselves hiding to America the coffins of marines dead in Iraq and tiers and protests of mothers and widows. To see these images we have to go to the cinema and see the Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 11/9.
So we have to notice with worry and sadness that there was a surrender of independent journalism to “war’s reasons”. There are newspapers and Tv stations as Washington times and Fox News that are openly with Bush and the American army, and there are others that hides themselves in a sort of limbo of “politically correct”.
“The respect of the truth in USA is slowly became a choose of not to side, of being satisfied by a superficial analysis of the facts”, Brett Cunningham wrote on the American Journalism Review.
Anchormen and columnists stopped with their traditional embarrassing questions, with the investigation of the truth in the name of the nation, giving freedom to the administration of develop its big global communication campaign.
In the best of the wishes, media only set two versions one against the other, as many media experts shows.
We can say that the epochal shock of the attack against the World Trade Center frozen the public opinion and American medias making them patriotically be with the “stars and strikes” and the President.
But the deep knower of American feelings  Bruce Springsteen doesn’t agree.  He is clamorously with Democratic in this electoral campaign. The Boss explained that he felt betrayed and he pointed at George Bush and the media as responsible for that: “ the press has let the country down. It took a very amoral position, because the most important facts are usually reported as ‘ a part says this, the other part says that.’ I think that Fox News and Republican intimidated the press, exiling it in a corner. This will be an issue that must be affronted after the elections. I don’t know if it began with the Iraqi war. The press should be the anchor of democracy.”
He Boss gives us a good analysis that explains how we are involved in a real political issue. That’s why Republicans are trying to boycott Sprengsteen’s concerts. Is also true that journalists of Washington Post cannot buy tickets for these concerts, for political reasons.
“I’ve always thought,” the singer says in his interview with “Rolling Stones”, “that the job of a musicians is to offer an alternative source of information.”
And he is right. In fact the ITC, the authority that vigils on telecommunications in Great Britain, ordered to radio and television stations to exclude from their broadcasting all the songs and videos that refers to war. So are victims of censorship pacifist songs, but also Bandages of Hot Hot Heat and Sex Bomb.
At the same time, editorial web sites censored the last book of the Colombian Nobel awarded Gabriel Garcia Marquez, because it contains the word “beach”.
So we don’t have to be astonished if, in this climate of censorship and self- censorship, some Ministers of the former neo-fascist Italian party, are able to black out the web site of Indimedia, guilty of have denounced the abuses made by some policemen during the G8 in Genova.
I tried to delineate a general scenery of the media during the Iraqi war because I do think that we are involved in a process that began before the middle oriental conflict and that will continue after it.
There are also specific aspects of the scenery of the Iraqi war.
The firs one is an astonishing datum. Forty-six journalists had been killed since the war started. Many of them by the American army. Someone by mysterious terrorist associations that move in the terrible bloody- media  sequence of executions showed in television or in internet.
The 8^th April of 2003, while Baghdad was liberating, the American forces bombed the Palestine hotel and the offices of the television stations Al Jazeera e Abu Dhabi: three journalists were killed. The spokesperson of the Pentagon Victoria Clarke said: “We’ve always said that Baghdad was not a safe place for the media.” Everyone knew that these places were full of journalists. But who wanted to go to Iraq had to enter his name in the list of the embedded, that were journalists inserted in the coalition army that could write only the things that were authorized by the army.
The result is a war that cannot be reported. Many reporters talked about “sand” and “fog” to explain how, even if they were on the front line and they risked their lives, they couldn’t know anything. Only satellite channels as Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi or Al Arabija tried to show the other face of the patriotic war of the marines, or as Fox News use to say, of “our boys”.
And for some times was valid the old rules of asymmetric wars. If the powerful American army threatened journalists in order to make its own propaganda, the guerrilla fighters welcomed foreign reporters in order to transmit to the world public opinion the human damages of that occupation war. But finally a new military and media  phenomenon born: the terrorism of kidnappings and executions. Lorenzo Bianchi, war reporter for the National Daily wrote: “The independent journalist is the sacrificial lamb of the conflict. On one hand the military machine is more and more unknowable for the reporter. On the other hand the terrorism of Al Qaeda considers the media as loudspeakers. In others guerrillas, the ones of Latin America, the reporter was an untouchable witness. The pacifist Enzo Baldoni was kidnapped and killed. He was Italian and so he was an enemy. Stop.”
So we have a war without witnesses, where two war ideologies fights against each other: on one side Bush, who wants to compact all the occident behind him, and on the other side Bin Laden (o who else?) that wants to do the same with the Muslim east.
We are further the physiology of lays and war propaganda. They are creating a real ideological campaign that wants to manipulate us in order to make a war that is in the origin enduring.
In Italy two directors of newspaper near to the government, Feltri of Libero and Ferrara of Il Foglio, says that we should show to our children the photos of the executions that are regularly published on their newspapers. In order to educate them, they say. Educate to what? To hate and violence. I will never ask a censorship. It’s good that Feltri and Ferrara (that confess to be on the CIA’s payroll) can write this kind of things. They help us to understand what is the biggest danger. Recently, I interviewed in Israel my old friend, Professor Zwi Schuldiner, asking him the existential dimension of the life in terror. He explained me that all is originated from a paradox: “Israel, that is the biggest military power of the Middle East, fears the Palestinian, that are poor and not well armed. Our enormous violence has his origin in fear, an irrational fear created by the kamikaze and enlarged by the government.”
Every day the Western public opinion gave us fear and hate associated with Arabs and Islam.
What can we do? We must ask for international and national rules that defend free information, denounce censorship. Call back journalists to their mission of witnesses and grants of public opinion and help them with the association of journalists.
Whit Informazioni senza frontiere, the Italian association for press freedom that I represent, we are working to a report on these phenomena, dedicated to media and democracy, coordinated by Prof. Roberto Reale, that we will publish in May. But it’s not enough. It’s necessary that the world of peace, of dialogue and of freedom make a cultural fight on these issues working with oriental and occidental intellectuals, in order to find common aims against the ideological campaign of the right. A community of free people isn’t identified by a flag or a language or a culture, and above all cannot born in the contest of an occupation war. A community of free people is made by men that respect each other and that consider each other equal, in a slow common work.
In Florence, with the help of Aidan White and of IFJ and of our Arabic friends, we will try to give a contribution to this work in a workshop at the beginning of December. We will start from journalists, because this is our job. The same: in Europe and in Middle East. 

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