Jase Mueller/Flickr/Creative Commons
I have a message for Mr. Brachino. Mr. Brachino should you decide to run another exposé soon please notice that I’m doing something much worse than wearing blue socks. I have decided not to shave. I won’t shave my legs, nor my chest or my brows. I won’t even shave my beard.
I decided to go the way of Mo’Nique, the star of Precious. I’ll let my hair grow in spite of Hollywood and guys like you who find a pair of turquoise socks to be bizarre. And if you think you should denounce my weird behavior so be it.
Now the reader may be wandering who in heavens is this guy and why we care about him, particularly in a blog which supposedly should deal with viral economic contagions? Okay, fair enough, let me explain.
Mr. Brachino is the editor in chief of Videonews, a news segment which runs within Mattino 5, for what I can understand one of Mediaset’s most followed early morning shows. Now I may be wrong here, I still live on the other side of the pond, and thank God when Mr. Brachino dispenses his meta-journalistic services on the Italian tube I’m still sleeping. It should be known that Mediaset belongs to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s colorful Prime Minister.
Recently Mr. Brachino had the brilliant idea to do an exposé on one of the Italian judges who had ruled that Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest owed 750 million euro to Italy’s CIR for the anti competitive practices it adopted during the takeover of Italy’s Mondadori Editore, the country’s largest publishing group.
Now the story is way too convoluted to be fully recounted into a blog posting, but it should suffice to say that to wrestle the Mondadori Group from CIR, toward the middle of the eighties, Berlusconi’s Fininvest (which in turn owes Mediaset), bribed its way into a friendly judgment. In the ensuing trial, 20 years of court battles, Berlusconi himself was dismissed only because the violation had reached statute of limitations.
So to give Italians a sense of what a menace this magistrate is, Mr. Brachino announced an exclusive investigation into his loony side. It consisted of a video-report in which Brachino’s hounds tailed the magistrate. In Italy such reports are prohibited and are considered a violation of privacy, especially when they are full of frivolous and slandering material. In the case of the aforementioned judge his questionable habits were smoking while strolling in front of the barber shop where he likes to have his hair cut, and a close-up of his socks, which were turquoise and were deemed to be bizarre, and therefore a proof of the magistrate’s poor mental abilities, by Mr. Brachino.
Now Mr. Brachino has been suspended for two months from his position by Italy’s journalist guild the Ordine Nazionale dei Giornalisti. This means that he won’t be able to byline his news segment and will not be able to publish under his byline. I would say great, but too little too late. It is behaviors such as Mr. Brachino’s that are gravely compromising journalism standing with the public, its integrity, and are condemning it to irrelevance. And here is the economic side of this posting. At a time in which thousands of journalists worldwide are loosing their job and/or cannot make a living out of their craft, it is a shame that people like Mr. Brachino should hold such a cushy and well-paid position. I suspect that his salary would suffice to operate a well-funded investigative web site, one that in the future may even help us to shed some light on the myriad of shady operations that Italian parallel structures have been conduction since the arrival of Mr. Berlusconi to power.
Paolo Pontoniere is a Neapolitan Journalist, who has been living in California for years and writes for major Italian media. Paraphrasing Charles V of Bourbon he would say that his interests curiosity never rests.
From Stones to sex, from science to conscience, from politics to pandemics, he follows with equal passion all events of which it is worth telling a story. Twists and turns of life led him to become an economic reporter, but as it happened with the Che, it was all due to a misunderstanding.
When his editors at the time asked during an editorial meeting if anybody knew anything about the economy he said yes, but he meant to say that to survive he didn’t need much. You see it was one of those artsy copy offices, full of practitioners of experimental arts; dreamers who breathed big ideas, had high minded ideals and lived on nothing else but sandwiches and cigarettes. Now things are different though. To live and work in Baghdad By the Bay one needs serious money, and he says, he too now understands the real Economy.
