Balassone: “Fazio has left a worn-out Rai. But Meloni’s Rai is unable to plug that hole”
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“In Viale Mazzini there is a state of monumentalisation which is the antechamber of the cemetery”, the former deputy director of Rai Tre tells us. Now the challenge is to fill the space by What’s the weather like: “I don’t know if the right is capable of doing it: its reference values do not speak to the community”
“People leave Rai only because they find cheaper offers outside”. To listen Stephen Balassonedeputy director of Rai Tre at the time of Angelo Guglielmi, the departure of Fabio Fazio from Viale Mazzini sheds more light on the troubles of public television than on an attempted purge. “Let’s say that in other situations they might have insisted on keeping him, thinking about the schedule, the role or the salary. But this time Salvini needed a scalp and the physiological conditions to which Rai was reduced due to its consummate relationship with politics did the rest”, says Balassone, who knows very well the reality of Viale Mazzini and the media system in general through his curriculum vitae and analysis. Summary: “In an extremely weakened team there is someone who has scored a goal on the net.”
For Discovery it is a great coup: interesting possibilities open up and why not, maybe a Letterman Fazio show, imagine the former councilor of Viale Mazzini putting himself in the shoes of those coaches who no longer have a team. For Rai, on the other hand, it is a blow in reverse, because it highlights all the rust that blocks the gears. “In prime time, apart from a few show of genius from fiction, there is a flatness that tends to be inexorably flatter and flatter. And the resources that flow out are not replaced, it happened with Floris but not only”. However, the problem is not so much the irreplaceability of the characters but that “the Rai management has forgotten how to do it”, that the company is no longer “fertile”. There is a reason: “The relationship between publishers and authors is missing. When publishers are not subjects but objects, as in the case of Rai, there is no comparison and there is nothing to fertilize. You cannot discover and develop talents, because to do so you need an environment where you can challenge yourself with virtues and limits: this is how successful conductors are born, because no one is born learned”.
Yet it wasn’t always like this. There was a different Rai and Balassone goes back a few decades to tell it. “I’m thinking of the last fires of TV divided up by the parties, when these were big and cumbersome troops but they had conspicuous pieces of reality inside: they were capable of giving life to a competitive TV from within. The solution of dividing up the company as if it were a holding company with companies competing with each other was certainly horrendous from a managerial point of view, but it channeled potential and a desire for expression. It was the very early 1980s and after that there was only a prolonged flat calm that pushed public television onto an inclined plane. The acceleration occurred when general interest TV no longer found itself alone and began to lose the elite audience who moved to the platforms”.
Today, however, we do not see competitive internal factors capable of moving anything. For this reason Fabio Fazio who leaves highlights more the hole he leaves than the possibility of new projects. “We’ll see what happens in October, but I think the company is the loser in this situation”. Also because, is the reasoning, the theme is not so much that of replacing a face but what has been built around that face over the years. And here, in addition to the rusty managerial gears, the political metamorphosis within the company must also be considered: “A hole will be created that Meloni’s Rai is unable to plug. An evening-Sunday ritual has gathered around Fazio. There is an elderly audience but also curious of various types, amalgamated by the fact of recognizing themselves in a community function of communication, in a series of values that apply to everyone. I don’t know if the right is able to replicate it, let alone if they have someone capable of interpreting something of the same type in a different key than that of liberal progressivism. Because it seems to me – he continues – that the quid of the Italian right is rather an individualistic particularism which at most can hate content, but which does everything except retain a specific audience”. Seen in this way, even the indignant reports that are broadcast in prime time on Rete 4 are “Petrolini-style agitation or the gathering of a value-free tribe”.
At the bottom remains the quagmire in which the company ended up. “There is a state of monumentalization of formats and conductors – says Balassone – which is the antechamber of the cemetery”. A company one step away from burial. “The only possible thing in the interest of the country would be that Rai was made subject rather than object by Parliament, but the problem arises from Parliament itself which does not want to take the toy out of its hands. If he continues like this, he’ll end up breaking it.”
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