More international backsliding

[_EAllusion]

In international news, a Putinist propagandist prone to right-wing conspiracy theories has been appointed head of their state media. The propagandization of state media usually has been the most important domino fall in recent slides in to quasi-fascist authoritarianism in other countries, so goodbye Italy, probably.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/worl ... t-rai.html

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

It's behind a paywall. If you have the ability to copy and paste it'd be appreciated.

- Doc

[_Gunnar]

You will probably be able to link to it after the first of the month. NYT allows a few links per month without subscribing.

[_EAllusion]

It's behind a paywall. If you have the ability to copy and paste it'd be appreciated.

- Doc

ROME — Marcello Foa has spread the claim that Hillary Clinton attended a Satanic dinner. He broke the news on his blog of a full-scale American military mobilization that never happened. A fan of the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin and a guest on Russia Today, he doubts the evidence that Moscow’s operatives poisoned a former Soviet spy because it is “too obvious.”

Mr. Foa is also now the Italian government’s most influential media figure.

On Wednesday night, leaders of Italy’s populist government cheered as a parliamentary committee approved Mr. Foa as chairman of Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, which has millions of viewers, thousands of employees and is, in Mr. Foa’s estimation, the most powerful cultural force in the country.

Supporters of Mr. Foa argue that he is an independent voice free of institutional allegiances and RAI’s insidious establishment bias against populist voices. His critics argue that his right-wing politics, euro-skepticism, concerns about the “damaging” effects of combination vaccines, and tendency to re-tweet conspiracy theories should have disqualified him for the job.

But he was the pick of Matteo Salvini, the powerful leader of the anti-immigrant League, who Mr. Foa helped introduce in March to Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former senior adviser. He also has ties to Mr. Salvini’s coalition partners, the Five Star Movement.

Mr. Foa’s appointment now has raised alarms about the state of the Italian media, never too healthy to begin with, and represents a victory of the populist parties over the establishment media that once discounted them.

It is far from symbolic, though. Mr. Foa’s appointment signals an opening gambit by Italy’s populists to take their anti-establishment message, and ambition to reshape public perception, from social media to the televised media mainstream, where the vast majority of Italy still gets its information.

On the eve of his appointment, Mr. Foa, 55 and affable, offered a glimpse of his new office with eight television screens in the wall, and shared passages of his book exploring the ways that politicians and spin doctors manipulate the truth and spread misinformation.

“The paradox for me is that somebody accused me of being a producer of fake news,” he said in a long interview.

Instead, he said, he would work to reverse what he claimed was a de facto veto at RAI of euro-skeptic politicians and government ministers, and to introduce voices to make the broadcaster “mirror” the current political reality.

Italy’s media have long warped standard journalistic practices like a fun-house mirror.

The brother of Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate and former prime minister, nominally owned il Giornale, where Mr. Foa spent decades working as a reporter and editor.

For years, Mr. Berlusconi flooded his private newspaper and channels and public airways with pro-Berlusconi propaganda, and it was Mr. Berlusconi who greenlighted Mr. Foa’s nomination, in exchange for political concessions.

Political agendas, partisan slants, a porous line between journalists and publicists (who call themselves journalists), anonymous reconstructions, conspiratorial tones and little accountability for false reports have riddled the credibility of the Italian press.

All of that fueled polarization and national frustration over the media, which Italy’s new populist leaders, Mr. Salvini and Luigi Di Maio of the Five Star Movement, clobbered as they rose to power.

The result is a largely impotent press that has failed to hold accountable populist leaders who reach enormous audiences directly with their social media accounts.

Mr. Foa said this was only natural, because by suppressing alternative voices on the state broadcaster, “You push the success of Di Maio and Salvini’s Facebook pages.”

He allowed that it is perhaps not especially helpful for a free press or democracy when leaders dismiss stories they do not like as fake news.

All the same, he said, attacking the news media was “part of the game” and so it was wrong to blame the politicians. “It’s not their fault, for me,” he said.

The Five Star Movement’s hostility to the news media traces back to its co-founders — the comedian Beppe Grillo and the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, an internet entrepreneur.

Mr. Grillo often featured his disdain for reporters on his wildly popular blog, calling them “the walking dead,” among other things. Mr. Casaleggio was an admirer of Mr. Foa’s right-wing blog and a futurist who envisioned a democratization of politics and media on the web.

The party has built a reputation for secrecy, doublespeak and antagonism to critical coverage.

In July, the government’s top spokesman, Rocco Casalino, an alumnus of the reality television show “Big Brother” and a Five Star power broker, made a thinly veiled threat to pull state funding from a newspaper, Il Foglio, which has been critical of the government.

“Now that Il Foglio will close, what will you do?” Mr. Casalino said to a reporter from the paper. “Can you tell me what purpose Il Foglio has? Why does is exist?”

The outburst prompted the Order of Journalists in Lombardy, to which Mr. Casalino belongs, to open an investigation into whether he had violated professional guidelines. In turn, the Five Star Movement’s blog advocated the abolishment of the organization.

Instead, in the current government it is Mr. Salvini, a former radio disc jockey, who has begun the charm offensive, wrapping his extreme language in an earthy, endearing delivery.

He has dominated Italian politics by dominating news cycles in Trumpian style — offering up some nugget, often over Twitter, that is outrageous and offensive to his haters, red meat to his supporters and simply irresistible to the Italian media. He has 3.2 million followers on Facebook and 880,400 on Twitter.

Mr. Foa first met Mr. Bannon, the former executive chairman of the right-wing Breitbart News, at the Lugano house of the Swiss financier Tito Tettamanti. He said he later helped arrange a meeting between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Salvini.

The mainstream press had a habit of “portraying all these events in such a mysterious way,” Mr. Foa said.

Mr. Foa’s son, Leonardo, fresh out of college, now works with Mr. Salvini’s social media maestro, Luca Morisi. (Mr. Foa said his son got the job on his own.) Mr. Morisi’s team has been compared to Casaleggio Associates, which administers Five Star’s internet platform and is now run by Davide Casaleggio, the founder’s son.

Before the election, Mr. Morisi acknowledged that the official website “We’re With Salvini” shared the same Google codes as sites supportive of the Five Star Movement, as well as “I’m With Putin” and other conspiracy sites.

“But we have nothing to do with the pro-Putin or pro-Five Star sites,” Mr. Morisi said at the time.

Since becoming Italy’s interior minister and vice premier, Mr. Salvini’s constant social media posts, television appearances and campaign-style travel have raised the question of when he actually works. But that is perhaps an outdated conception of work in an age when the media message is the métier.

At 12:38 p.m. on Sept. 24, the government passed Mr. Salvini’s tough new immigration law. At 12:55 p.m. he posted a smiley face emoticon. At 1:09 p.m., he tweeted a link to himself talking about it on Facebook Live. At 1:45 he tweeted that the hashtag about his decree, #DecretoSalvini, was “in ten minutes already third on Twitter in Italy! Thank you.” At 2:59, he tweeted that the hashtag was “FIRST in Italy on Twitter.”

Mr. Foa has had his own adventures on Twitter.

A few days before the 2016 United States presidential election, he shared an Italian blog post claiming Mrs. Clinton had attended a “Satanic” dinner with John Podesta.

He said that the report seemed plausible to him because he recalled reading in some “very serious press” about “pedophilic” art in the collection of Mr. Podesta. (John’s brother, Tony Podesta, collects contemporary works.)

“I didn’t go deep on this,” he said in the interview this week in his defense, acknowledging that he “might be wrong,” and that he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to publish the sensational to boost his audience on social media.

“It’s happened to me a couple of times,” he said.

In 2017, he falsely claimed the United States military was preparing to mobilize 150,000 reservists, possibly for a war against Syria or North Korea or Russia. He said a friend in American national security circles told him Mr. Trump had called up reservists and that he checked with an expert he knew in Italy who said it was true.

“So I had two sources and I wrote just five lines on my blog, ten lines. And that’s all,” he said.

Still, he thinks reporters could be more cautious, when, for instance, reporting that Russia was behind the March poisoning of a former Soviet Spy, Sergei V. Skripal.
“It’s too obvious for me,” Mr. Foa said of the evidence in the case. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Oh, you see, Putin is the bad guy doing the bad thing.’”

His prime concern now, though, he said, is restoring the credibility of RAI, which he said had been destroyed by an establishment, anti-populist bias. Without that trust, he said, political parties, internet trolls and regular citizens would continue to use social media to misinform the public and erode democracy.

“We’re in a very dangerous territory,” he said.

Correction: September 28, 2018
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the web team of Luca Morisi. The team has been compared to Casaleggio Associates, a company closely linked with the League’s coalition partner, the Five Star Movement, but there is no evidence that alumni of Casaleggio Associates work in Mr. Morisi’s team.

[_EAllusion]

Here's a good article on the recent collapse of democracy in Poland that someone linked to me in response to this article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... on/568324/

That only happened a few years ago, and the most significant event after authoritarians took a slim majority is that they used their power to takeover state media. The takeover of information streams to provide a soft lock-in of authoritarian control is playing itself out over and over. Russia, Turkey, Hungry, Poland...

There's a core problem here with these fascist-like authoritarian movements that I have no clue how to solve. Once they take power, they use the available institutions to lock themselves into enduring authoritarian control. They just don't believe in the legitimacy of the values of liberal democracy, so they undermine it the second they get the chance. So you can defeat them at the ballot over and over, but if they win once, then you're in trouble. I've read academics write on this phenomenon, but solutions aren't forthcoming there either. The message is, "situation is bad, folks."

Italy is in deep trouble.

[_Kevin Graham]

Brazil is about to elect a guy who wanted the country to go back to a military dictatorship.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I think the big takeaway for me is this:

Why is there a state media in the first place? This absolutely lends itself to control of whatever regime gets into power. It's a very dangerous proposition to have the government fund and then control the media.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

I think the big takeaway for me is this:

Why is there a state media in the first place? This absolutely lends itself to control of whatever regime gets into power. It's a very dangerous proposition to have the government fund and then control the media.

- Doc

I agree that there shouldn't be state media, and one of my arguments for that is that the power is too great should it fall into the wrong hands. Countries that have functioning state media have relied on prevailing norms to prevent that from happening, but that was shortsighted. It is what it is, and fascist friendly authoritarianism is continuing to spread across the globe.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I think the big takeaway for me is this:

Why is there a state media in the first place? This absolutely lends itself to control of whatever regime gets into power. It's a very dangerous proposition to have the government fund and then control the media.

- Doc

I agree that there shouldn't be state media, and one of my arguments for that is that the power is too great should it fall into the wrong hands. Countries that have functioning state media have relied on prevailing norms to prevent that from happening, but that was shortsighted. It is what it is, and fascist friendly authoritarianism is continuing to spread across the globe.

Yeah, I'd rather have what we have now, a decentralized multi-media platform where people can get an endless supply of opinions on current affairs. The obvious problem with that is people tend to fall into echo chambers, and then they shape their worldview on the media outlets that give them comfort or confirm their biases. I certainly don't want to go back to the days where a few newspapers and television outlets basically had the soapbox. *shudders*

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

America is a oddball country in that we don't have a state media to take over, but we do have a situation where a significant % of the public is attuned to propagandistic right-wing media and another very large chunk of the public is attuned to straight reporting that has journalistic norms that make them irresponsibly friendly to the narratives out of propagandistic right-wing media. It's like half-way to having state media. It's still better than actually having state media, though. Things are bad as it is, but we'd be so screwed right now if we did.