Mattarella: “No third-party certifications on information: authenticity is guaranteed by ethics”

The President of the Republic refers to the Constitution to recall that “the authenticity of the information is entrusted, by law, to the professionalism and deontology of each journalist” and that it would be “misleading and contradictory with the constitutional provisions themselves to imagine that third parties could be entrusted with certifiers of the legitimacy of information flows”. Sergio Mattarella he writes it in a message for the 70th anniversary of theUSPI, Italian Periodical Press Union. An opportunity to look at the more than a thousand online or paper newspapers which constitute, in Mattarella’s words, “independent voices that offer citizens the possibility of satisfying the fundamental right to be informed”: “It is certainly the task of the Republic – we read in the message released by the Quirinale – to support the editorial initiatives that are characterized in this sense, starting from the guarantee of equal business conditions and access to the market” and this in the light of the fact that “the pluralism that nourishes democratic life and freedoms of Italians” is “guaranteed by the constitutional charter”.

Mattarella’s message, in the days when the clash is rekindled in the light of the rules contained in the justice reform signed by Charles Nordio, also serves to underline that “in the free world, the exercise of democracy is based above all on the responsibility of every protagonist of the information in knowing how to distinguish facts from opinions, in the freedom of access to an increasingly articulated diffusion system. It is of a particularly delicate topic that finds no limit, criterion or measure in the simple multitude and heterogeneity of the contents promulgated by the platforms”. Hence the reference to professional ethics as an evaluation criterion and the warning regarding the hypothesis of third-party control bodies.

“The conference promoted to celebrate the birth of USPI, which took place in 1953, the years of the construction of republican Italy, – concludes Mattarella addressing the USPI secretary Francesco Saverio Vetere – will be able to represent, on the 75th anniversary of the entry into force of our Constitution, the most profitable opportunity to face the new challenges with renewed confidence, having as a beacon the correct information based on mutual respect and the affirmation of the rights of the person and of the communities , values ​​on which our civil coexistence is based. Best wishes to all the participants of the Conference “, he concludes.