Radio too? No, not you?
“Radio anch'io” by Giorgio Zanchini dealing with hostile comments on the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The so-called polarization is a serious epistemological and epistemological problem. Battista Falconi's opinion
“Radio anch'io” is Radio Rai's most important information and in-depth broadcast, the only and last survivor of a golden age in which it competed with “31-31” and which cannot be looked at without nostalgia, given the disrepair of public radio schedules, where the baton of this format has passed almost exclusively to Radio Tre (of which Giuliano Ferrara complained about its direction and management, in a sharp and apt little article for il Foglio ). The program is hosted by Giorgio Zanchini, a presumably progressive but moderate journalist, intelligent and clever enough to make himself well-liked, as well as endowed with undoubted professional qualities – cultured, brilliant, prepared – which led him to inherit the role from Corrado Augias as a good book and cultural presenter on Rai Tre.
For a few days now, thanks to international current affairs and in particular the NATO summit in Washington, Zanchini has been regularly repeating a mantra that he has often recited in the past: he reads or at least reports the most hostile comments that come to the broadcast and that they accuse of exposing only the prevailing theses on the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Atlanticist, Euro-Westernist, mainstream positions, according to which Israel was attacked by Hamas and Ukraine was invaded by Russia: in both cases, therefore, an executioner and a victim are indicated, right and wrong are distinguished quite clearly. Obviously, those who criticize him are the pacifists who would like to ignore this approach, to reconcile rights and wrongs in a more distributed way, up to the listeners who are more decidedly pro-Russian and Putinian.
Zanchini, by continuously reporting on these positions, exorcises them and has a good hand in replying that it is not true, that the program also hosts different and adverse positions: but the game, precisely, is too easy and a listener has rightly I objected that it is not enough to introduce a different voice to establish a real balance. In short, “Radio anch'io” would end up in the situation we described, for another radio programme, in relation to bioethics and the isolated hosting of Lucetta Scaraffia .
In this sense, "Radio anch'io" becomes the paradigm of a new conformism, of a new mainstream and, even more, of a crisis of meaning of reality and its representation. Not a new issue, which exploded with the pandemic and the controversy over "no vax" – emphasized, never quelled, back in the news in recent days – and which we could formulate as follows: how to democratically take free opinions into account, when one of these is considered prevalent by the majority but, precisely for this reason, it risks becoming a dogma? The so-called polarization is a very serious epistemological and epistemological problem. We generally believe that the crisis of meaning that almost all of us feel pervaded, in different ways and at different times, derives from conflict, divergence, contrast, attributing the blame to social networks, while instead it is the result of great consensus, of convergent thinking that old or new media tend to amplify.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/radio-anchio-no-tu-no/ on Sat, 13 Jul 2024 05:51:43 +0000.