Rai Gaza. Conductors against directors, Supervision out, CEO Fuortes strengthens. What is Meloni’s plan?

Giorgia Meloni must decide: does she want to pass as the premier who lets Rai “wither” or as the premier who wants to save it? The worst thing that can be said of a leader is what one begins to say about her: “She is leaving a CEO of the Democratic Party like Carlo Fuortes at the helm of Rai, someone who she does not esteem and about whom one can complain in public, but bear in private. Meloni what does he do?”. Rai today looks like Gaza. It is a “strip” of land which until it is “assigned” will only generate ulcers, debts, and “disposable” television products.

The only success of Rai, after the World Cup, is the fiction on General Dalla Chiesa and it could even have had more ratings, already excellent, than those it recorded, if only it had been vigorously defended and not postponed by four months from the scheduled date . In Rai disappointing news, the programs of Drusilla Foer, Mia Ceran; fragile is the debut of Alessia Marcuzzi. On two major events, the death of Benedict XVI and the attempted coup in Brazil, Rai was overtaken in speed by La7.

If your CDM worked like Rai does, would Giorgia Meloni be satisfied? “Here you make Italy or you die” Meloni promised, but Italy was made by television as it is enough to read in a good book on Italian linguistics. Can a government that does not deal with television have the ambition to “make Italy”?.

Fuortes appointed by the Draghi government today smiles and dances the rumba. He no longer has to answer to governments, parties: he has freed himself. He confronts a board of directors who now votes against him but awaits the formation of the Supervisory Commission. The three councilors of Pd, M5s and Rai employees challenge him on a weekly basis. They don’t want to fall with him. Di Majo, indicated by the M5s, continues to ask why a director like the former Tg1 director, Giuseppe Carboni, has not been employed for a year. Laganà and Bria complain that Duilio Giammaria, former director of Rai documentaries and presenter of a program like Petrolio, is not valued despite having received a promise to host a new programme.

Giammaria, on Twitter, when asked by a viewer when it would be possible to see it again, replied that we will see it again “when I manage to convince Di Bella, director of in-depth analysis and Ciannamea, director of distribution”. Three months have passed since the birth of the government and Rai without the Supervisory Commission is like the Paris Commune. The CEO has further luck. The Italians who pay the license fee have “lost” Michele Anzaldi, the only deputy who had made Rai a “moral issue”. He is the former parliamentarian of Italia Viva today outside Parliament who, it should be remembered, remains the publisher of Rai, whether he likes it or not.

The whole company knows that the president of Rai Marinella Soldi does not appreciate the turn taken, she fears the abandonment of the government which has postponed the signing of the service contract and the lack of support for the Rai Way operation, an industrial operation without which Rai risks the catastrophe.

Fuortes has only two internal “advisers” and they act as a relay link between him and the “new references”. I am the director of Rai Cultura, Silvia Calandrelli, and the director of in-depth analysis, Di Bella, close to retirement (in March) and therefore close to leaving Rai and then returning. Di Bella would have sought the expertise of Beppe Caschetto’s stable to manage his “a rebours”, his backwards, the return. What skills does Meloni use for Rai?

If it is true that for FdI, the Rai expert is Giampaolo Rossi, a former member of the FdI board of directors, why do all Rai executives keep talking to Gennaro Sangiuliano, the Minister of Culture? Until Meloni chooses there will be two currents. One who says that Fuortes lives “like in a bubble”. It is a current close to Rossi. Another carries on an underground collaboration with Fuortes. It is a current close to Sangiuliano. In a television, change is not sudden. Fuortes is thinking about the Rai schedule of 2024 and drawing that of 2025. Tomorrow’s Rai is being built today. Meloni wants people to say about her: “She had a precise idea about Rai” or that in two years they want to say about her “her ideas about Rai were so valid that they remained ideas”?

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• Carmelo Caruso

• Carmelo Caruso, journalist in Palermo, Milan, Rome. He started at La Repubblica. Today he works at the Foglio