An Evening with Marco Travaglio

Marco Travaglio, the director of the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, spoke to a full house at the Teatro Morlacchi in Perugia on Friday night. Travaglio spoke for over two hours about the state of the mainstream media in Italy today, lamenting the lack of adequate journalistic coverage of corruption within the government. 
“Usually, the news that doesn’t get reported is the most important, while the news that gets reported the most is of entirely secondary importance,” Travaglio said in his opening remarks. “I think in Italy we know about Salvini’s girlfriend and Di Maio’s new girlfriend than we know about the links between the government and the mafia.”
Travaglio also criticised the mainstream media’s coverage of the current government, pointing to the sensationalised coverage of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in the days before he had arrived into office. He argued that the media’s tendency to predict “apocalyptic” and “catastrophic” events that in the end don’t occur has led to a loss of public trust in the mainstream media. 
He also criticised the elite media for its tendency to blame “fake news” for the recent surge of populist victories in Europe and the United States rather than addressing what he considered to be the real problem – that the mainstream media is out of touch with the public it is meant to be serving. 
The full talk can be viewed here: https://www.festivaldelgiornalismo.com/programme/2019/an-evening-with-marco-travaglio

Priscille Biehlmann – volunteer press office IJF19