Radio Radicale, funding halved: “Now the danger is closure”

tl;dr

for the agreement with the state that assigns Radio Radicale the digitization of archives and institutional broadcasts, the radio was expecting 8 million in funding, they are still half way through. Despite the guarantees that Meloni had given at the beginning of the year.

The Chamber decided: By 2026, Radio Radicale will have 4 million for broadcasting the activities of the Chambers. Instead of eight. Now the Senate will be able to modify or confirm. If the public contribution remains halved compared to previous years, there will be serious difficulties for Radio Radicale. The administration has already made it known that February salaries will not be paid on time.

Prime Minister Giorgia opened the end-of-year press conference Melons he had declared: “The Government intends to present an amendment to the Milleproroghe decree to guarantee Radio Radicale the extraordinary contribution intended for the digitization of the historical archive of the newspaper. A contribution that is added to the ordinary one”. The “ordinary contribution” is the 3.8 million that the law on publishing had already attributed to the radio. A further two million were foreseen for the archive, which Meloni said he was committed to. However, the bulk of the funding remained out, eight million for the broadcast of chamber sessions and parliamentary commissions. From Palazzo Chigi they made it known that the issue had been reported to the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy and that a response was awaited.

Now the two million have become four and compared to previous years there would still be four missing.

The situation is quite indecent, they already have problems with salaries amounting to a few million euros.

There was Feltri’s Good Morning the other day talking about 6 cents a year saved per Italian, and the loss of one of the best Italian information services (together with Rai News24), on the other hand who knows how many festivals of the albino porcini mushroom, the golden potato and the sticky sausage will be financed in some remote village who knows where.

Good morning

For six cents – Mattia Feltri

You will probably understand in three lines what I am getting at, but imagine a radio that does not broadcast a second of advertising, does not broadcast a song, broadcasts the work of the Chamber and the Senate, the meetings of the Superior Council of the Judiciary, the congresses of parties, right, left and center, those of the trade unions, the assemblies of the judiciary and criminal chambers, conferences of a political, philosophical and literary nature, book presentations, press reviews of Italian newspapers, reviews of international newspapers, insights on America and China, on prison and immigration, trials in court, on appeal, in assize courts, inaugurations of the judicial year, debates, cinema and book columns, that is a radio station totally outside the market, committed to accounting for everything that the others who instead aim for shares and revenues do not account for, and for this reason, for the public service otherwise offered by no one, and so indispensable to democracyreceives eight million euros a year from the State, with which it pays salaries, now reduced to four million to save a little, or to make every Italian save the equivalent of six cents, when every year Rai receives around one billion eight hundred million euros through the license fee, plus advertising, with which it also wages and pays its dancers, and therefore imagine that the radio never adds up, and is destined to close down. What Giuseppe Conte was unable to achieve is about to be achieved by Giorgia Meloni: closing Radio Radicale.