“Interceptions are media violence. The ‘gag’ is a hypocritical whine”. Michele Serra speaks

He doesn’t like the word “gag”, the one that some newspapers use to oppose the mere idea that the publication of wiretaps can be limited. He doesn’t share it. “We journalists are a category that often confuses freedom of the press with impunity of caste,” he says. And indeed Michael Serra he thinks that wiretaps have been, and still are, an instrument of media violence. “If the culprit ends up in jail or disgraced in the newspapers, that’s a business risk for him, he puts it in the bill. But if the innocent ends up in jail or gets smeared in the papers, that’s a dead man. Here you are. The newspapers don’t understand this. Those who do our job, on the other hand, should start from this horrid certainty: the innocent die”. Thus, as a man of the left which he obviously is, Michele Serra, one of the most important journalists of our country, finally wonders what is the reason why “his” left is in fact defending, still today, the wiretapping abuse. Perhaps for instrumental reasons. Policies. “Since the days of Tangentopoli the left has embraced a kind of judicial shortcut. What could not be addressed politically found an unexpected judicial solution. Not only did it not work (power, if that was the issue, is as arrogant as before, corruption more vital than before), but it had devastating side effects. The culture of guarantees, once the workhorse of the left, has gone down the drain. And the moralistic spiral has fueled populism”.