A-Infos (en) Italy, FAS Sicilia Libertaria: Shit news (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

If you had gone to the Repubblica Palermo website at the end of March 
you would still have found some articles on the "Altavilla Milicia 
massacre", which occurred on 11 February. Rarely, if ever, does an 
information portal follow a piece of news, a case, a story so fiercely, 
because we know that the risk of saturation is around the corner and 
that people's attention must be solicited every time with new events. 
And instead the terrible crime case that occurred in the Palermo area 
filled pages and pages.
We know everything that happened in the house where three people were 
killed. Every most macabre detail was reported, without ever taking into 
account the filtering role that journalists should have, rather 
encouraging a taste for horror. It was done with the most stale 
rhetorical formulas: the house of horrors (il Corriere), the torture 
step by step (Repubblica), the mystery deepens (LiveSicilia), everything 
about the massacre (Giornale di Sicilia). Let's start with a fact: the 
story is so dramatic that writing about it was almost an obligation. But 
the huge difference lies in how you choose to report the most gruesome 
details. For years the order of journalists has been equipped with 
various ethical charters which explain how to behave in a crime case: 
the names of the people involved are not reported and more generally 
sensitive information is not reported, the most violent, no details 
capable of leading to the identification of the minors are provided. 
None of this happened: reporters stationed themselves for days in front 
of the house where the massacre took place, exploring every nook and 
cranny; we also know the diary pages of each minor; Even the lives of 
the neighbors were disrupted.

Even though it is not a very representative story and, ultimately, not 
even very attractive - the religious fanaticism that then degenerates is 
told less and less in books and films and TV series - some elements of 
this story, in fact, were particularly suited to undermining the 
collective imagination: from the evil that lies within the family unit 
to mental manipulation up to the fear of the devil. And yet, I repeat, 
precisely because of the delicacy of these aspects, tact and attention 
would have been necessary. Instead, interviews with exorcist priests 
have flowed in, treated as credible interlocutors, while little or 
nothing has been said about the family's economic difficulties, about 
psychological problems and the lack of assistance from the institutions, 
about people whose suffering was known but who were leave alone.

This crime case is part of the broader national exploit of true crime. 
As usual, cultural Italy has begun to mimic the USA, replicating the 
fixation on gender and even making the wording its own, when our country 
has a much more consolidated link with crime news (and its 
degenerations). In recent years, hundreds of podcasts, dozens of books 
and TV series have appeared, and some of these have become real 
editorial phenomena. At the beginning it was the rediscovery of the 
writer Carlo Lucarelli and his program Blu Notte, revived in the podcast 
format in an amateur manner by an enthusiast and perennially at the top 
of the streaming listening charts. Then came the adoration for the 
presenter Franca Leosini and for the TV program Chi l'ha visto, the 
Veleno podcast by Pablo Trincia (focused on the stories of 16 children 
removed from their families because they were accused of being part of a 
sect of pedophile Satanists) , the book La città dei vivi by Nicola 
Lagioia (a clear attempt to replicate the narrative model of Truman 
Capote's masterpiece In Cold Blood through the bloody murder of Luca 
Varani by two young Roman bourgeois), the podcast Indagini (which every 
month presents a more or less well-known case of crime news that 
occurred in Italy). Let's be clear: this is not an unprecedented 
phenomenon. Since the primordial tales around the fire, human beings 
have shown a particular predilection for the macabre, for the brutal, 
for violence in general, especially if real. In the Greek Odyssey, after 
all, many remember the details of the massacre of the Suitors, with the 
servant Eurycleia forced by the hero Ulysses to purify the blood-stained 
room, just as it is known that the Brothers Grimm were inspired by a 
foul deed news for one of their most famous fairy tales, namely Hansel 
and Gretel. All forms of art have drawn on crime news: from music (The 
Song of Marinella by Fabrizio De Andrè) to literature (The Adversary by 
Emmanuel Carrere) up to cinema and TV series. Furthermore, Italy has 
always fed on crime news, especially when it overcame the stupid fascist 
censorship - because for the regime's propaganda it was necessary to 
hide all the murders. Some cases of crime have coincided with history, 
starting from perhaps the most famous one, which put the entire 
Christian Democratic party in difficulty, i.e. the death of Wilma 
Montesi, so much so that the writer Ennio Flaiano defined him as "a 
living force in the nation's economy."

Perhaps certain excesses achieved in the past will no longer be seen, I 
am thinking of the model of Cogne built by Bruno Vespa or the appeal to 
young people not to leave their homes because of the monster of 
Florence. If on the one hand there is hope that the current visceral 
interest in true crime consists of a season destined to wane, and in 
this sense the signs are starting to be glimpsed because frankly the 
supply is excessive compared to the demand, on the other hand it should 
be noted that the current interest in true crime, or crime news, is just 
another attempt at capitalist speculation, accessible to everyone like 
never before. The new singers of small and large tragedies don't care 
about the victims, all that matters is the social positioning, the 
career prospect that true crime offers today. More than serial killers, 
we need to fear their biographers.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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