Broadcasting bias, anti-Zionism included

On April 27, Presa Diretta, the flagship investigative programme of Italy’s RAI3, aired what it billed as a report on the war in Gaza. In reality, it delivered a 45-minute indictment of Israel, laced with insinuation, distortion, and elision so blatant it would be comical were it not so dangerous.

Riccardo Iacona’s broadcast ignored entirely the events of October 7—no mention of the 1,200 Israelis slaughtered, no footage of the raped women, the burned children, the mass hostage-taking, or the 5,000+ rockets fired at civilians. Instead, the episode offered a gauzy, mournful portrait of Gaza as victim and Israel as brute, with every cliché of the anti-Zionist script faithfully recited.

In response, a formal complaint was submitted to General Pasquale Angelosanto, the national coordinator for combating antisemitism at the Cabinet Office, by former senator Carlo Giovanardi, lawyer Yuri Maria Prado, and philosopher Ugo Volli. The complaint accuses Presa Diretta of inciting hatred, spreading disinformation, and effectively serving as a megaphone for the delegitimisation of Israel and the Jewish people. The signatories argue that such a broadcast on publicly funded television is not only unethical but violates basic standards of balance and accountability.

The reaction was swift—and predictably dishonest. Journalists’ unions wailed about press freedom. The cultural left accused the complainants of McCarthyism. Iacona struck the usual posture of righteous victimhood, claiming he was under attack for “telling the truth.” Not a single one of these voices addressed the core issue: that Presa Diretta concealed the instigating event of this war and framed it entirely through the anti-Israel lens that now passes for ‘critique’ in much of Europe’s institutional left.

What Giovanardi, Prado, and Volli have exposed is the quiet re-legitimation of antisemitism under the cover of public broadcasting. Presa Diretta didn’t merely report on a war; it presented a loaded narrative in which the Jewish state functions as a metaphorical villain, stripped of context, condemned in absentia. No need for nuance, no risk of moral ambiguity—just one long sermon.

Presa Diretta is not journalism. It is ideological theatre, state-funded and consequence-free, performed in front of an audience already primed to blame Jews for global disorder. And it comes at a moment when Jewish communities across Italy and Europe face daily threats, synagogue protection, school lockdowns, and marches echoing slogans indistinguishable from those of Hamas.

The left’s outrage is not about freedom of expression. It is about preserving its monopoly over a narrative in which Jewish suffering is inconvenient, and Jewish sovereignty intolerable. The complaint to Angelosanto should not only be upheld; it should force a reckoning inside RAI. Either it remains a public broadcaster, or it becomes a subcontractor for those who would see Israel dismantled and its people demonised.

Presa Diretta exposed nothing—except its own prejudice.