Giampaolo Rossi alla Festa dell'Ottimismo 2025

I would start from this last consideration. I believe that not only from part of politics, but sometimes from public opinion, there is an interpretation of Rai's role that does not reflect the role Rai objectively has in the industrial, economic, and cultural life of Italy. It's a sort of narrative that is spread, but often newspapers are also a vehicle for this altered narrative, which makes people imagine Rai as a sort of permanent cost center, a big wagon that weighs on Italians through the license fee and that we would all live much better without. In reality, there is difficulty in understanding that Rai is a sort of central industrial hub in the life of our country, a company that produces wealth, produces work, and allows entire supply chains of the cultural industry, not just cultural, of this country to stay alive, without which they would not exist. We are talking not only about cinema, not only about fiction, not only about the world of animation, that is, audiovisual as such, but also about a whole series of spin-offs linked to the Italian cultural industry and its ability to tell itself to the world. So what often happens? When we talk about Rai, we wake up in the morning, wait for 10 AM when the ratings come out to see if Rai's ratings are 0.1 or 0.2 higher than competitors, and we don't consider that Rai, as a public service, plays a different game and championship compared to a commercial broadcaster, to all commercial broadcasters, because this company, with the least public resources in Europe, produces the greatest quantity of content that can also be exported at a European level. At the last Venice Film Festival, Rai presented something like 23 works and productions that represented the national narrative, not just cinema, shorts, docufictions, etc. There will be just as many at the Rome Film Festival. It's the way a nation manages to tell itself internally, but also to tell itself abroad, and it's above all a great industrial spin-off that allows hundreds of thousands of jobs and a very large turnover for the entire Italian production activity.

Well, let's say there is a theme here that needs to be clarified a bit. The license fee is not a dogma. In many European countries, the license fee has been removed, but public resources have been maintained, public services precisely to perform their function of being the pilot of the cultural industry through different forms. In France, the license fee was removed for a period, then reinstated, then removed again. In Great Britain, for example, the license fee remains, and in Germany it remains a fact. The issue of public resources is more central than the way these resources arrive. In Italy, we also have another very strong anomaly, obviously guaranteed by the legislator in past years, namely that Rai could keep public resources constant, and based on this evaluation, laws were allowed that provide that Rai has a cap on advertising collection, so Rai cannot access the advertising market freely to guarantee the possibility for broadcasters that live only on advertising to have a larger slice of the advertising market. Let's say there is a bit of an anomaly here because when the legislator drafted this regulation, it provided that the public service would at least keep the license fee constant and perhaps also provided by law for revaluation net of inflation. The revaluation net of inflation over the last 10 years has never happened, so public resources have decreased, and today Rai finds itself keeping the entire cultural industry alive with far fewer resources than it had 10 years ago.

Yes, but it's not contextualized to the present. Let's say that the acts that have somehow penalized Rai over the years happened much earlier than the era we live in. Laws were made that restricted Rai's margins of intervention. Regulations were made that nonetheless encased Rai within a dimension of a public company. Today, what is the paradox? It is that we have a company like Rai that practically keeps the entire audiovisual industry alive, but I also think, for example, of the whole issue of sports rights and sports broadcasts. Without Rai, there would practically be no free-to-air sports coverage on generalist channels, and it was trapped in past years within a publicistic mechanism, a public company that finds itself competing in a fiercely aggressive market, in many cases very violent, where unlike 10 years ago, when there were essentially one or two operators, today we find ourselves having to compete with platforms, with global players, with the disintermediation of the role of traditional television. And so the paradox is that this company is still asked to maintain this fundamental role for the maintenance of the cultural industry, but sometimes it doesn't have the tools to do so, or has fewer and fewer. So the attempt is to try to tell Italy that Rai is a fundamental industry, it's not a company in itself, it's a company that enables the narrative of our nation, the construction of the imaginary, because in the end, the imaginary of this country still passes for a large percentage through what Rai manages to produce, with all the defects, limits, and even errors that can be made. And Director Bernabei, who was the founder of Rai and was a great Christian Democrat, said that Rai's role is to remind Italians who they are. To do that, you also need ideas and resources.