ROMA (ITALPRESS) – “Today I handed my resignation to the presidents of the Senate and the Chamber as president of the parliamentary commission of Vigilance Rai. It is a disproportionate but necessary and inevitable decision. I had to acknowledge that staying and reporting was not served. All I have to do is give a strong signal in front of the arrogance and the unfair use that this majority makes of the parliamentary institutions and commissions.” So in a post on her social channels Senator M5S Barbara Floridia. “I feel the honour and discipline within me that must be the role I represent, for these reasons I cannot remain to look impotent. As long as I could have tried in every way to allow the Commission to work, I looked for dialogue, I resisted provocations, obstacles. I have fought with all my strength to allow a Parliament guarantee body to perform its duties. I have tried in any way to defend the right of citizens to have a Commission that really dealt with public service. I also publicly denounced with a lot of ardor,” he adds.
“But it is now evident – he explains – that to this majority there are some very important assumptions: respect for the prerogatives of the minority, respect for the institutions more in general and the rules governing the functioning of the parliamentary organs. The systematic boycott of the supervisory committee by the majority and the situation in which the public service is falling does not allow me to go further. For almost two years, the forces supporting the Government deliberately prevent the normal conduct of the Commission’s ordinary work because the oppositions did not bend to vote for their candidacy for the Rai Presidency. The block therefore is not reiterated and extended for institutional reasons. Not because of differences in the merits of the questions. But just for blackmail. It had never happened in the history of our Republic that a guarantee body was held hostage by those who govern. And I with it. It no longer has any sense to preside over a Commission which has now emptied its functions, artificially kept alive by the majority only to provide a fig leaf to decisions that are taken elsewhere, by the Government, on the shoulders of millions of citizens who pay the canon every year”.
According to Floridia “while there is an infringement for the failure to comply with a binding European regulation for Italy – called the Media Freedom Act – which has been living for a year without this majority feeling the duty and responsibility to implement it. In the meantime, we witness one of the most desolate shows in recent history of public service without being able to follow requests for hearings, clarifications. Nothing. A public service management that clearly and without a minimum of modesty has rewarded almost exclusively political affiliation, mortifying the merit, quality, independence and even the economic sustainability of editorial choices. Who could have left. Including the viewers. Others were brutally shown the exit. The thing that struck me most was to see professionals and professionals who for years have held the mission of public service with competence, dignity and right back to be placed on the margins, isolated, humiliated, subjected to continuous and unacceptable pressures.”.
“While some were laid red carpets and guaranteed gold bridges for programs that turned, punctually, into clamorous failures. Choices that in the next palinsesti are clamorously confirmed. Why today? Because the measure is full. Because a year is missing in the elections and it would serve an active and vigilant Commission on public service, because even the smell of hiding what is happening is missing. I am not willing to spend the last year of this legislature assisting impotent to the demands of hearings by the opposition systematically rejected by the majority to prevent asking questions, to demand answers, to ask account to those who are managing the Rai. Do not consider these resignation a surrender. I’m not. I consider it an act of freedom and denunciation. Of freedom, because I consider them the warning to defend an important right: that of citizens to be freely informed and not manipulated. I would like to point out that the Commission’s report is a dangerous precedent which we cannot underestimate. An institutional wound that affects democracy and institutions, but that we will have the duty and responsibility to remargin,” he concludes.
SI DIMETTONO ANCHE I COMPONENTI DELL’OPPOSIZIONE
“As members of the opposition forces of the Rai parliamentary supervisory commission, we have resigned all, with immediate effect. It is a necessary political act, as a result of the paralysis that for months prevents the Commission from playing its role as a guarantee, because of the divisions within the majority and of a management that has in fact emptied its functions. A choice matured after repeated appeals, left unlisted, to the Presidents of the Chambers, Ignazio La Russo and Lorenzo Fontana, and despite the call of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to the full functioning of the Parliament’s guarantee bodies.” This is written in a note by the opposition group leaders in the Parliamentary Commission for the general address and supervision of radio and television services Stefano Graziano (PD), Dario Caroallo (M5S), Angelo Bonelli and Giuseppe De Cristofaro (AVS) and Maria Elena Boschi (IV).
“The anticipation of the new palimpsests confirms the progressive decline of public service: they reduce listening and credibility, reduce pluralism and merit, increase the expensive external contracts and the Media Freedom Act is disregarded. Remaining within it would mean abdicating to the democratic control function and validating an increasingly partisan use of public service. Our resignation asks citizens to return a free, autonomous and truly pluralistic Rai,” they conclude.
– photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
