Vittorio Feltri

Vittorio Feltri

Vittorio Feltri (born June 25, 1943 in Bergamo ) is an Italian journalist .

journalism

Feltri began his journalism career in 1962 with the newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo , where he was responsible for the review of current films. As a result, he was hired as an editor for the daily La Notte .

In 1974 Gino Palumbo offered him a post at the Corriere d'informazione , from which Feltri moved to the Corriere della Sera three years later . At the time, the newspaper was headed by Piero Ottone . In 1983 he became director of the BergamoOggi ; a year later, however, he returned to the Corriere della Sera as a special correspondent .

In 1989 Feltri took over the management of the weekly newspaper L'Europeo . According to his own statements, he managed to increase the circulation from 78,000 to 140,000 units during his time as director.

L'Independente

In 1992, Feltri took over the management of the weekly newspaper L'Independente from Ricardo Franco Levi . At the time, the newspaper was in a serious financial crisis. But Feltri managed to modernize L'Independente and develop it into a successful newspaper by skillfully exploiting the bourgeois indignation over the national scandal of the Mani pulite . The General Secretary of the Italian Socialist Party , Bettino Craxi, had to take particularly sharp attacks from L'Independente .

In April 1993, Feltri met the then entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi , who offered him a position at his financial holding Fininvest . However, he declined this offer. In the course of the same year, the circulation of L'Independente reached 120,000 copies, overtaking its direct competitor Il Giornale .

Il Giornale (1994-1997)

In January 1994, Feltri was contacted by Paolo Berlusconi , editor of the daily Il Giornale, who offered him the direction of the newspaper. After Feltri had publicly and vehemently rejected such an offer shortly before, he took over the management of the Giornale as the successor to Indro Montanelli .

Feltri stayed with Il Giornale for four years and recorded an increase in circulation from 130,000 to 250,000 copies. During the same period, he had a column for the weekly Panorama and collaborated with other Italian newspapers, such as Il Foglio , Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino .

On November 8, 1997, after 35 lawsuits had been filed against him, Feltri declared all of his newspaper articles against the adversary of Silvio Berlusconi Antonio Di Pietro as misdirected and defined them as pure electoral rhetoric. In December of the same year, Feltri resigned after publishing an extremely benevolent article about Antonio Di Pietro. At this point in time, Il Giornale had reached its absolute peak in circulation with 250,000 copies.

In the following years Feltri took over the management of various newspapers, such as Il Borghese and the Quotidiano Nazionale . On June 1, 1999, he also took over the management of the Gruppo Monti Riffeser publishing group .

Libero

On July 18, 2000, Feltri founded the independent and liberal-conservative daily newspaper Libero . Until his resignation on July 30, 2009, he held the position of director and editor of the newspaper.

The Libero appeared for the first time on July 18, 2000 and is based heavily on the political content of the center-right parties in Italy. Feltri defined the style of his new newspaper as sarcastic , snappy and politically incorrect. The sometimes disrespectful portrayal of politicians and political events is characteristic. With this concept, Feltri achieved an increase in print runs from 70,000 to 220,000 copies.

On November 21, 2001, Vittorio Feltri was removed from the professional register of Lombard journalists. Feltri had previously published a list of all Italians charged with pedophilia . In February 2003 the National Association of Journalists lifted this deletion.

Il Giornale and Libero (2009-2020)

On August 21, 2009, Feltri took over the management of the daily newspaper Il Giornale owned by the Berlusconi family.

In the last week of August 2009, Feltri launched a serious attack on Dino Boffo , director of the Catholic newspaper Avvenire . He used alleged harassment allegations of a homosexual character against Boffo. The attacks provoked outraged criticism from the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) and ended with Boffo's resignation on September 3, 2009.

Between December 2010 and May 2016 he switched several times between the newspapers Libero (December 2010 to June 2011, from June 2016) and Il Giornale (June 2011 to June 2016). In June 2020 he announced his resignation from the management of the newspaper Libero and his resignation from the professional association of journalists because of repeated quarrels with the association.

criticism

In an article in the weekly magazine L'Espresso in September 2009, doubts about the credibility of Feltri's journalistic work were publicly expressed for the first time. According to L'Espresso , various Feltris newspaper reports were inconsistent with the facts or were even fictitious. Among other things, a sensational report about the investigation into the Aldo Moro case and an article about the spread of leprosy in Sicily turned out to be false. An interview published by Feltri with the songwriter Francesco De Gregori was presumably falsified and the report about the shots of the escort of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro at a fire helicopter was untrue. On November 5, 1995, Feltri was the only director of an Italian newspaper not to have the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin on the front page.

Legal proceedings

On February 14, 2006, Feltri was sentenced to one year and six months in prison in Bologna . The court had him of defamation of the senator of the Left Democrats Gerardo Chiaromonte convicted. The verdict refers to an article published in the Quotidiano Nazionale in which the senator's name appeared in the so-called Mitrokhin dossier .

On July 2, 2007, Feltri was acquitted in a cassation case of the charge of defamation against the public prosecutor Gherardo Colombo . In an article published in Il Giornale in 1999, Feltri accused the public prosecutor's office dealing with the Mani pulite case of unilateral investigations against Silvio Berlusconi . In this case, the court emphasized the freedom of criticism guaranteed by Article 21 of the Italian Constitution.

On August 7, 2007, Feltri, together with Francobaldo Chiocci and the Società di Edizioni SpA, was sentenced by a court of cassation to pay compensation of 45,000 euros to the doctor and writer Rosario Bentivegna . In several articles published in the daily Il Giornale, Bentivegna had been compared with the SS officer Erich Priebke .

Election of the Italian President in 2015

In the election of the Italian President on January 31, 2015, Feltri received 46 of 995 votes (4.6 percent) in the decisive fourth ballot and thus achieved third place behind the social democratic candidate Sergio Mattarella and Ferdinando Imposimato, candidate for the MoVimento 5 position .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Vittorio Feltri - Piccola storia del giornalismo
2. ↑ Il direttore: dovevo farlo, c'erano 35 querele in the Corriere della Sera
3. ^ Marco Travaglio - La scomparsa dei fatti
4. ^ Statement by the professional association of Lombard journalists ( Memento of April 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ Boffo va al contrattacco "Contro di me una patacca" in La Repubblica
6. ^ Alberto Giorgi: Vittorio Feltri dà l'addio all'Odg: “Nauseato dai processi”. In: ilgiornale.it. June 26, 2020, accessed August 3, 2020 (Italian). 
7. ↑ Feltri e una mandria di bufale ( Memento of September 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) at L'Espresso
8. ↑ Diffamazione, Feltri condannato a 18 mesi in Corriere della Sera
9. ↑ Feltri assolto ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
10. ^ La Cassazione: attentato di via Rasella e 'legittimo.Feltri paghera' per diffamazione at RaiNews24
11. ↑ Elezione Votazione 4 La Repubblica, January 31, 2015