Ranucci and the spectacle of due process applied (only) to himself

In the Ranucci case, yet another disastrous mix-up occurred yesterday. In his campaign to moralise against the moralisers, Ranucci – moraliser-in-chief – thanked Minister Guido Crosetto for a tweet dedicated specifically to the Ranucci case. In the tweet, Crosetto says many things. He says he considers “this way of reporting the news and holding trials in the media arena to be an unacceptable barbarity”. He says he considers it a barbarity “even when the victim is someone who, in the past, has often been a perpetrator of that very same barbarity”. Crosetto also says he is rightly disgusted by the Ranucci case due to the “constant breaches of investigative confidentiality” and the “publication of wiretaps and chat messages which, by law, should not be published”. Crosetto rightly regards all this as “an affront to the Constitution and to democracy”. In this newspaper last Monday, our friend Gian Domenico Caiazza effectively highlighted this: Ranucci, Caiazza wrote, is being swept away by a tsunami of wiretaps, chat messages and conversations, “which are ravaging his professional and private life with the uncontrollable and unstoppable violence characteristic of that deadly, misused weapon”. Yesterday, Ranucci, in a tweet, expressed his support for Crosetto. He wrote: “I thank a minister, towards whom we have not been kind, for his consistency and for distancing himself from the RAI’s decision to discredit me.” The interesting point is plain for all to see. Ranucci admits that the publication of wiretaps that are criminally irrelevant is an affront to democracy. This represents a belated recognition of reality. The challenge now is to persuade Ranucci not to employ in the future the very method he has long helped to fuel: presenting criminally irrelevant wiretaps as an investigative tool rather than a disgrace to the rule of law. Above all, we must extend a measured acknowledgment to Ranucci’s followers, especially the friends of Il Fatto Quotidiano, who for years have maintained that in Italy everything is sorted as regards the issue of telephone wiretaps published in breach of citizens’ right to privacy, and who today, instead, see the ‘moralist-in-chief’ stepping in to denounce the blow to democracy caused by the out-of-control mechanism that legitimises the publication of wiretaps used in the press (not in this newspaper) in breach of the right to privacy. Ranucci has many flaws, but his sudden defence of due process – applied, of course, only to himself – is a fantastic spectacle. Thank you.