The Italians and the War in Ukraine. Fake news, short memories.

Author: Guido Baratta | Image: Splash

A new report recently commissioned by one of the largest Italian newspapers, La Repubblica, shows that almost half of the Italian population believes that the information on the war in Ukraine is distorted, controlled, and biased and regards the images of the Russian massacre in Bucha as largely false, falsified and exaggerated.

The report also pointed to a more significant number of the same population that believe such slaughter is being amplified artfully made up by the Ukrainian government to de-legitimize the figure of Vladimir Putin and criminalize the action of the Russian army. These data points are not very reassuring news andindications. However, it is not new that Italians' "insecurities" linger at the center of public attention.

Just two years ago, while COVID19 was ravaging the emergencies rooms of the Italian hospitals, leaving hundreds of thousand doctors and nurses to exhausting timetables and hazardous work, the Italian population did become enchanted by an enormous amount of conspiracy theories accusing doctors, journalists, and politicians of faking the emergency and being news terrorists. Those conspiracy theories are still somewhat followed, especially now while the overall news coverage of the disease has dramatically reduced.

In 2020 another report from the Eurispes found that almost 16% of the Italian population openly denies the Holocaust, claims that the extermination of the Jews never took place, and even among the ones that believe it did actually happen, one third more of them claim that it would not have produced six millions of Jewish victims but probably much less.

The report also offers some intriguing surprises while describing the political tendencies of the deniers, revealing that the majority of the people interviewed recognized themselves with the five-star movement and not with some of the most conservative parties as many would expect them to be.

According to the Digital Consumer Evolution report recently published by Deloitte on digital consumption in 2021 in Italy, more than 22% of Italians have stopped using at least one social platform, either temporarily or permanently. The three main reasons for this choice are getting tired of the content on the platform, the excessive presence of fake news, and concerns for their own privacy.

The report also mentions a correlation between those who believe in conspiracy theories and the use of social media as a means of information. At the same time, another more recent study from 2022 does establish that 82% of Italians cannot recognize fake news and consider the Internet an obscure tool but still rely quite heavily on it to search for an alternative bucket of information against both TV and Newspaper, while still considering them, too strongly connected with governmental institutions.

As for the War in Ukraine, it's clear that some of the cruel images the TV images carried onto the Italian living rooms were probably too much for the Italians to bear as they may reveal some of their own recent past. Judged to be too evil to be accurate, and in turn, raising a flurry of suspicions, denials, and sometimes canceling the distinction between victims and aggressors.

However, when carefully extracting some of the denier's narratives on TV and in newspapers, an unexpected supplemental pattern starts to surface, which seems to be related to the actual necessity to protect some of the financial interests of the Italian businesses and their respective media channels—all which still hold quite a few hands together with Putin and the Russian economy.

So while the primary goals of the Italian media seem poised to give everyone a window onto which to see an up-close picture of the war and its brutal perpetrators, it also provides the excuse for the creation of suspicion and general skepticism. In a country with very few certainties, those same suspicions fuel mistrust and hatred among its inhabitants, where no one believes anyone else, where no business has a clear purpose other than profit, where lies become part of the business normality, and where violence becomes invisible and intangible.