The grotesque theater of talk shows that "give voice" to Russian propaganda

Russian Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov is a big shot and even if in the White Zone he has stuffed his answers to the questions of the host Giuseppe Brindisi with the worst falsehoods about the war in Ukraine, for him the speech is different. In general, however, the tendency of Italian talk shows to invite politicians and "journalists" of the Russian regime on TV - Lilli Gruber often does it at Otto e mezzo, Massimo Giletti did it at Non è arenena on La7 as well as Bianca Berlinguer to Cartabianca on Rai3 - seems to respond more to the search for the “rare beast” effect, with dystopian dressing, than to some kind of usefulness to the debate. Those guests also serve as easy targets for the conductors themselves, who by throwing themselves against those words and eventually cutting off the audio for the guest on duty thus accomplish their perfect liberal performance. For the series, I would give you the space but if you say certain things I will silence you.

The problem is obviously upstream: what should we ever expect from characters like Vladimir Solovyev, Nadana Fridrikhson or Olga Kurlaeva? When writers and hosts decide to invite these people to their talks, what effect do they think they will achieve? They know very well the positions of those people. So we have an idea: the goal is to open a window of exoticism towards a world that is very distant even from the most pro-Putinian of Italians, with the aim of establishing themselves as "pluralists", in a surreal level playing field between invaders and invaders. . The only usefulness that these hosted can have, in fact, is perhaps really giving us the idea of ​​the air that is blowing in the Russian Federation and of how, willy-nilly, journalists and commentators are at worst complicit in what Putin established and in the best victims under blackmail. Nothing else.

The problem therefore is not to press them or ask them the right questions, something that Gruber for example often manages to do, but that ends up in a staging without any journalistic value. The only sense of such hosted is precisely television, aesthetic, theatrical, attending the parts of the bizarre and the remote, the dissonant and the grotesque. Given that our relations with the Russian world are now reduced to a minimum, these channels open with those who live in a context where free speech is stifled, journalists killed and the war in Ukraine with the Bucha and Mariupol massacres called "operation special "seem perhaps to suggest to the authors some hold on the audience.

Like the big cats unworthily shown in circuses, or the poor trained dolphins of water parks, these propaganda phenomena growl their unlistenable and unacceptable theses on command. from thousands of kilometers to the benefit - indeed, to the curse - of an audience well sheltered by the protective balustrades. Those who follow those broadcasts are therefore living a double deception in the safety of their televisions: first of all they are under the illusion of following pluralist and open to confrontation programs (but must pluralism be guaranteed to the occupying forces of a country and to those who support them?) When in reality they are listening to agents disinformation in the Kremlin that steals time from good information, which would be desperately needed. Secondly, despite himself, he climbs into the ideal ring carefully prepared for the fight between the liberal and democratic conductor and the "ugly and bad" Russian guest who must first be left a bit of a rope but then silenced and put back in the cage. The game is so clear and there for all to see that many still like to fall for it.