How bad the weather is at Rai

Catalyst for political speeches and old ways of understanding TV, the public network pays for the gigantism of a structure that can’t keep up with modernity. The Fazio case and the reversals explained by the prince of criticism, Aldo Grasso

With every turnaround Rai, everyone is looking for him. In the round of nominations, counter-nominations, resignations, omissions one always forgets that at the bottom there is something called television, with its audience, its assets, knowing how to do it or not knowing how to do it. After the reactions of the government and the opposition, after Salvini’s childish tweets, after the party editorials, to have an unintoxicated point of view you have to hear what Aldo Grasso, prince of television criticism, thinks about it. On the pages of the Corriere, Grasso claimed immediately the right to defend Fabio Fazio, precisely because it has never spared him criticism (criticism of a TV that is too “respectable and obsequious, gooey, sentimental, correct and sometimes a little Marzullesque”). But it was also a TV that worked, that raised an audience and invented a space that didn’t exist before. In short, one can defend Fazio, without loving too much the television that he makes, much less slipping into the chorus of funeral orations, of the “Bulgarian edict” and of those who discover the grim logic of subdivision in the spring of 2023.