There has always been morbid attention to heinous crimes. Crime news has always attracted us, from Cain and Abel to Greek tragedy, we try to exorcise violence by telling it: an anthropological strategy to defend ourselves from it psychologically. Perhaps.
Judicial reporting, the right to be informed, the public dimension of the trial are in themselves acts of civility: where everything is secret, where everything is stopped and judged in opacity, abuses of power lurk. The fact remains that, even in transparency, there is a way and a way.
In the tragic cases that ended the lives of Yara Gambirasio and Giulia Cecchettin, one aspect among many strikes us: Yara’s parents and brothers; Giulia’s father and brothers have always shown a rare composure and all the more admirable because it comes from people who are deeply wounded in the most direct way: the only ones who no one would feel like asking not to lose their rationality, if they gave in to excesses we would understand it. But they never did, not even when their stories were exposed beyond measure. Even when the careless story added to the violence an indirect but no less painful violence, which seems to have no end, they remained composed.
Two episodes are controversial. In recent days, Quarto Grado broadcast important excerpts from Filippo Turetta’s confession to investigators: this is documentation on file, no longer secret by law, which will enter the public trial that has recently begun in the next few days. There is no violation of investigative secrecy because the notice of closure of the investigation has already been filed, there are the requirements of the right of reporting, i.e. the public interest, it remains to be understood, but the question is moral not legal, whether it is really necessary for reporting purposes to expose Giulia’s very polite father to the dripping of the murder of his vivisected daughterwhether the spectator’s right to be informed must necessarily lead to ruthless exposure or whether it cannot fail to pass for a more compassionate and respectful way of everyone. Among them all also includes Filippo Turetta, if you didn’t want to think of him, still accused and not yet convicted, although I confessand therefore still presumed innocent by the Constitution, one might think of her family, which Giulia’s father, with his usual firm courage, repeats that he cannot judge. If he doesn’t do it, who are we to judge? However, one should think of Giulia’s family condemned to live again in spite of themselves.
In the meantime, news has arrived of a complaint from the Gambirasio family to the privacy guarantor: audio interceptions of the parents, in which only their desperation can be perceived, not used in the trial, but probably in the documents and therefore available to the parties, have ended in the Netflix docuseries: whether there has been a violation of the law or not, we can speak without fear of denial of pain pornography in its pure state.
Cui prodest, if not to the audience? All this has little to do with judicial reporting, – which is moreover bound by increasingly rigid rules, of dubious expediency, despite being the only part regulated by the code of ethics of journalists – if anything it concerns the spectacle of justice, the so-called “parallel trial ” or “media” whatever you want to call it which, without any rules, mimics the real trial on TV, often distorting it.
In the era of life exposed on the social media square, the impression is that this spectacle is increasingly degenerating, with the complicity of professionals of all sorts, and that the search for catharsis is being replaced by a morbidity that no longer finds limits in piety. The episodes we are talking about, which affect already very tried families, suggest that the mark of civilization has been passed: we are perhaps losing that amount of empathy that allows us to activate the ethical antibodies that serve to empathize with the suffering of others to avoid making it worse, that internal brake that we hope will be activated in the face of excess that leads to trampling on the other, whoever he or she is, etc.which should be governed both by the Christian commandment of love thy neighbor and by its secular counterpart, do not do to others what you would not want done to you.
It will be whoever is responsible to establish whether it is legal to expose what has been exposed, but given that for some time we have profitably divided the legal from the moral, knowing that something is legal does not exempt us from the duty to question whether it is also ethically acceptable, or even if only appropriate; the fact that it is permitted by law does not prevent us from saying “no thanks”, both as authors and as spectators, if the details exposed and stopping to look at them offend our humanity and our sensitivity and if they certainly cause gratuitous pain to others more implicated in us. The offer of on demand and thematic channels has greatly increased, this allows viewers greater choice. Invoking censorship would be a worse patch than a hole, too many liberticidal temptations already threaten our democracies, but it always exists and it would be good Don’t forget to exercise, in good conscience, the freedom to change the channel.