On May 1, Italian viewers of the talk show Zona Bianca found themselves face to face with a rare face on Western airwaves: that of Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Simultaneously translated, Lavrov had the opportunity to recall the basic ideas of Russian rhetoric on the war in Ukraine, saying that his armed forces exclusively attacked military infrastructure, that the horrors committed in the city of Bucha were staged and that Ukraine was governed by personalities close to Nazism. Asked if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was Jewish, Lavrov replied, “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish origins.” A claim so shocking that Putin himself apologized to Israel.
The forty-minute interview provoked a lively debate, due to its nature but also to its context: it was carried out on one of the channels of the Mediaset group, owned by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and known as close to Vladimir Putin. The interview was quickly criticized by the current Prime Minister, Mario Draghi. Because in Italy, it is part of a media climate deemed complacent with the Russian argument. The Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (Copasir) has thus, as Le Monde recalls, opened an investigation into suspicions of Russian infiltration in the Italian audiovisual sector.
Because it is not rare, on the Italian sets, to find personalities close to the positions of the Kremlin and determined to defend them. Among them, the researcher Alessandro Osini, specialist in the sociology of terrorism and teacher at the prestigious LUISS University in Rome. Invited several times on the set of the program Cartabianca, on the Rai Tre channel, he thus affirmed on the air that “if Putin found himself in a desperate situation where he risked losing the war and had to use the atomic bomb, Europe would be morally responsible’.
Under the pressure of the controversy that followed, Rai Tre had to terminate a contract signed with the researcher, to whom she had assured 2000 euros for six appearances in the broadcasts, reports Corriere Della Sera. Behind these recurring invitations of personalities, and in particular pro-Russian journalists, a recurring quest for buzz on Italian sets, who do not hesitate to stage confrontations of radically opposed opinions. The management of Rai, however, plans to review the organization of its talk shows in order to set limits to this “infotainment”.
