We were not misled by the opening feature of the new season of
‘Report’ – now without Deranucci – entitled ‘Piste e depistaggi’, designed to mislead anyone still interested in
Valter Lavitola and his associates.
That is their prerogative, at best—meaning the award-winning Rai team (“some people were hoping we’d be taken off the air,” said Claudia Di Pasquale of the Identitaria movement).
Not that the evening’s flagship investigation – entitled “Gli Sciacalli” and dedicated to the so-called “influencers of decay”, the YouTubers or social media content creators (often using hidden micro-cameras, as in the best scoops from “Report”) who “roam our cities on the hunt for petty urban crime and scenes of hardship”) – was all that much more intriguing. According to the allegations made in the investigation broadcast on Sunday, “they have turned urban petty crime into a format generating millions of clicks”. Which is also true. After all, if there were no petty crime, there wouldn’t be millions of clicks either. The topic has already been covered, denounced and analysed by all online media – and subsequently by the print media too – for a couple of years now. Figures such as Simone Cicalone or Simone Carabella have long been part of a well-known Italian hate-mongering landscape. For ‘Report’, it was still a matter of flying the flag of civic activism and exposing fear, which, as is well known, is the preserve of the right. This explains the logic—which is, after all, obvious—behind the ‘monetisation of fear’, because the insecurity felt by people who have been, or who risk being, robbed or attacked in Rome’s underground system generates mountains of views. These, in turn, generate profits that the elderly lady at Anagnina station cannot even begin to imagine. But ‘Report’ explains it all to us, including the political exploitation of the phenomenon.
We certainly aren’t driven mad by these people – nor do we allow ourselves to be misled by them – the ‘influencers of decay’: Carabella, who travels to Venice to disrupt a Muslim prayer; and another individual, Mervin Hunter, also in Venice to mark pickpockets with red paint and then post the images on social media. Meanwhile, since the problem of pickpockets was not invented by these opportunists, Venice is grappling with a new legal aspect of the matter, one that is not exactly helpful. In fact, thanks to a provision in the Cartabia reform – under which thefts of this kind can only be prosecuted if the victim files a complaint (which tourists do not always do) – and to the ‘remedial conduct’ provided for in the code, the (rare) pickpockets who are identified can have the offence expunged by returning the stolen goods (or a proportionate part thereof) via Money Transfer to the victim’s bank account. If the victim cannot be traced, a donation to a charity is also sufficient, and the offence is deemed settled. Many are beginning to suspect that this loophole is rather convenient. The star of the show, however, is Simone Cicalone, the former boxer who, complete with a security detail, patrols Rome’s stations.
We do not condone such practices. The question that arises is: is it Cicalone’s fault? Or that of the Iranian influencer Arash Kamangar, aka ‘Guardian of Rome’? Last week, in a post announcing the episode on the ‘Report’ account on X (what’s the point of using Musk’s social media platform, eh?), we read: “The lack of security on the underground is Cicalone’s bread and butter, though he is always ready to exploit news stories, as in the case of a woman attacked last February in Rome’s San Lorenzo neighbourhood by a young migrant”. Could it not also be the fault of those who fail to uphold security, and of those who create the very conditions of decay? Without letting ourselves be misled, we had hoped that “Report”’s new direction would be a departure from the usual facile populism in favour of the indignant – albeit those on the left.
