Foreign correspondent: how to look elsewhere?

How does an Italian journalist observe the news in France, and how, in the opposite direction, does she judge the work of French journalists in her country? The position of foreign correspondent is above all a bulwark against caricature. We must speak of a country beyond the clichés, and the biased representations that are made of it.

The exercise is not so simple

Rather than questioning a French permanent special envoy, beyond our borders, we questioned an Italian journalist, in place in Paris. What view of our French news, and what view of our approach to Italian news?

Her name is Chiara Piotto. Star presenter of the all-news channel Sky TG24, she could have been satisfied with her notoriety on the set, but she put herself to the test. Investing in new forms of digital technology and embarking on a career as a reporter abroad. Here she is in Paris, correspondent for Sky Italia in France, immersed in recent days in the demonstrations against the bill relating to pension reform.

She admits her surprise at the mobilizations. Italy no longer challenges government projects in the street, the processions have withered over the years and claims, a form of breathlessness. And on the subject of pensions, the legal retirement age has been set at 67 for more than a decade. It therefore takes a lot of pedagogy and understanding of the issues, to explain to the Italians that the French do not want a departure at 64 years old. That the opposition to the text relates to the principles of fairness, and that it is necessary to delve into the articles of the bill, to retranslate the essence of the debates in the assembly, and in the street.

But at the same time, Chiara Piotto is struck by the shortcuts of the French press on the election of Giorgia Meloni as head of the Italian government. Titrate “Ie return of fascism in Italy”, is undoubtedly exaggerated, given the career of the new resident of the Chigi Palace. Was she called a fascist when she was Silvio Berlusconi’s Minister of Education? Were we surprised at the time that such a portfolio (the education of our children) was entrusted to a former brown shirt?

Undoubtedly the reality is more nuanced, and here is the Italian correspondent, forced to play a role that she does not like, to take a more moderate position, which places her in a posture of defense of Giorgia Meloni, which she does not want not beforehand, but the necessary balance of accurate information requires it.

Our era lives in a permanent vertigo that sucks up memories

We have already spoken of the extreme right in power with Matteo Salvini, then we had the so-called populism of Beppe Grillo and the five-star movement, a technocratic left, then a radical right. Governments continue to change at a pace that does not see the end of terms of office in Italy.

One team chases the other, like one piece of information chases the other, and everyone turns away from it. If a phenomenon is verified as a common denominator, on each side of the Alps, in the political field, it is that of abstention during elections. The foreign correspondents in France had underlined it after the legislative ones, and the Italian journalists after the last regional ones, saw that the desertion of the offices was not only a French characteristic.

But beyond the headlines of the news, the main difficulty lies in the treatment of social issues. As long as the French imagine the Italians under the pizza-calcio-mafia prism by considering them as rogues, and the Italians see the Frenchman, the baguette under his arm, the sea urchins in his pockets, with this haughty and snobbish air of “puzza sotto il naso”the nuances necessary to understand the complexity of the terrain will always struggle to emerge.