15 March 2006

Petruccioli nominated by Mediaset as President of RAI

Claudio Petruccioli is now viewed as one who did not come to the defence of Lucia Annunziata. In fact he criticised her for having simply performed her duty as a journalist. Lucia Annunziata is a journalist of the RAI, a company that in all ways belongs to the Italian people, not to Mediaset.

Petruccioli had already shown how he can be indulgent towards Mediaset by not intervening when there was the great “throw out” from the RAI. This was when the man who is (but not for much longer) President of the Council was in Bulgaria and issued the diktat that Biagi, Santoro and Luttazzi should be sacked from the RAI.

He didn’t lift a finger following that when the journalist Massimo Fini and the comic Paolo Hendel were kept away.

The friendship that connects Claudio Petruccioli and Fedele Confalonieri is well known but perhaps less well known is that the TG5 journalist Giangiacomo Mazzucchelli is not only working for Mediaset but is also the son of Petruccioli’s wife. There’s nothing illegal in that, but the connection between Petruccioli and Mediaset seems evident, above all in his choices.

Any president of the RAI must take care of the information available for Italian people, and not take care of the head of the government, nor of his editorial interests. I don’t believe that the TV spectators approved of the total lack of respect shown by Berlusconi in relation to Lucia Annunziata and his arrogance in explaining that Enzo Biagi should have been satisfied to be thrown out by him in as much as he got a hefty payment at that time.

The president of the RAI should have shown that he was indignant. Petruccioli didn’t do this. In fact he did the contrary.

It is evident that the Italian people are not the audience to which he defers. After the elections he must of necessity take act of this.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Information