Behind the “independent” Italian press that attacks the President of the United States

Analysis by Paolo G. Parovel

Freedom of information is the fundamental, democratic right to defend te truth against all falsifications, not the opposite. Due to this, it should be clear that the disinformative war unleashed by European and US media against the new President, D. J. Trump (LINK), has nothing to do with independent press. It is a domestic and international political-strategic attack, which uses mass disinformation as a weapon.

The independence of these media is in name only. The truth is, nearly all of them are at the direct or indirect service of the circles that oppose Trump’s political and economic strategy, or to global and international strategic opponents of the US. These are the categories of opponents that are attacking the credibility of the new Administration, because that has dissolved their past influence networks and because it is willing to strengthen the United States domestically and internationally.

The case study of Italian press

In Europe, the best case study of this operation is Italy, which is the Country with the highest levels of corruption, of political influences on press, and of ambiguity towards the US and in international relations. Nearly all Italian media have huge debts, so they depend on public funding and bank loans that are influenced by politicians, and the Italian political establishment is also the less reliable of the Atlantic Alliance.

For instance, Italy has an official attitude towards the United States close to servile, however, domestically, Italian politics spreads and exploits since decades anti-American prejudices to accuse the US of its own, most inconvenient operations: from Italian domestic terrorism to the destabilizing interferences in sensitive areas like the Balkans as in the conflicts that affect the Middle East.

After the 1985 crisis of Sigonella, and after the end of the Cold War, the old ruling Italian parties were overwhelmed by scandals of political corruption, and their main three branches, – former-communists, socialists, left-wing Christian democrats – established the present-day PD, the Italian “Democratic Party” which has rehabilitated Neo-fascists, marginalized left-wing Liberal Democrats, and it has formed ten coalition Governments (1995 – 2001, 2006 – 2008, 2011 – 2017) obtaining direct or indirect control of most media, especially of the Gruppo Espresso.

The PD uses this machinery of propaganda, and the tactic support of the Neo-fascist right wing also to support the abnormal activities of Italian foreign politics in the present-day Free Territory of Trieste as well as against Slovenia and Croatia (LINK) the provocations against Egypt (LINK), the attempts to interfere in Libya (LINK), and now also the disinformative war against the new Administration of the United States, doing it with increasing violence and offensiveness.

Since Trump defends himself online denouncing the disinformations, on February 8th the Italian newspapers of the Gruppo Espresso did go as far as accusing him to be a dictator «willing to silence independent press» the same way as totalitarian regimes like Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, newspaper “Il Foglio” (controlled by Sorgente Group) raised the tone of the insults calling Trump «un paranoico da operetta» (which translates as “a caricatural paranoid”).

The Italian press attack is from the PD Government

Still, the core of te problem is somewhere else, because in the Italian media system, strictly influenced by politicians, the main newspaper and press agencies do not attack foreign Heads of State without the offstage consent of the Government.

The latest Italian Government to have authorized such violent attacks against a President of the United States was the Mussolini’s fascist one, in wartime, and for professed strategic and political purposes.

Instead, there are no declared strategic or political reasons why, in 2017, an Italian Government that calls itself democratic and friend of the United States associates its “independent” media to an extremely violent disinformative war against the President that has just taken office.

In the wait for an answer, it must be observed that this aggression remains the most relevant anomaly of US-Italian relations since 1945, and it confirms that the current Italian political system is an absolutely unreliable political and strategic partner.

© 11 Febbraio 2017