Davide Parenti

Information DAVIDE PARENTI The ‘Hyena’: entertainment is not journalism The trouble with TV news? They no longer talk to the people Language differentiates the transmission of information. Which is never accurate and impartial, for everyone sees things from his own viewpoint by Carlo Giorgi It’s a fact that if the TV news exposes a wrongdoer, you remember it for the next twenty-four hours. If Le Iene (The Hyenas) does it, you won’t forget for months. And what began as mercilessly abrasive entertainment has made more impact than the professional reporters. Is this the future of informative TV? We asked Davide Parenti, founder member of Le Iene, if we should start preparing for a future devoid of austere journalism. You are one of the inventors of Italian infotainment... Hold on, I do entertainment and not news: there’s everything in Le Iene... Exposure items, but also variety, and we have a light-hearted spirit: news reporters have a different background from us, at a higher level. I don’t say no, it’s possible for light entertainment to do things that border on news and information, but I don’t feel we’re an alternative to news programmes. The big difference between an entertainment programme and a news bulletin is the language: the news doesn’t use popular language, to understand it you have know a lot of words - like deregulation and proportional - that they take for granted. Le Iene, unlike the news, speaks the language of the people. It’s a difference to do with communication and not information. We can’t be alternatives to the news because we don’t do news, you might call what we do an attitude: a lightweight look at life, mischievous but morally exacting at the same time: if we expose someone saying, for example, that in a certain district the differentiated rubbish collection then gets mixed... we do it by sitting in front of the dustbins for four days... It sounds a lot like the principle of verifying the news, just like a reporter... No, no, it’s just being honest. In Italy other people do the reporting. We don’t feel like, I don’t know, Ballarò, a news discussion group for young people... That’s not our competition, our programme jumbles up lots of stuff, in a seriously offhand way.

YOUNG WORDS HAPPENING - September 22, 23, and 24, 2005 - Torino, Italy www.comune.torino.it/treguaolimpica [email protected]

Can you deal with ‘awkward’ issues and go against the grain in a big media group, like Mediaset? We try to have a go at everyone, but it’s obvious that unconditional liberty doesn’t exist. In the eight years Le Iene has been going out there have been a few arguments with the company. But Mediaset has always let us work. It’s clear that if we want to have a go at a multinational cartel that’s selling milk in Italy at twice the price of other countries, and seeing that those companies contribute millions of euros in advertising to the company, when the film goes on air somebody in the company will accuse us of stirring things up... But it’s a fact that in eight years we’ve done stuff that no other Italian TV has ever done, Rai included. Obviously the programme is the result of certain mediations; one of the reasons we can have a go at anybody is unquestionably the fact that ours is a successful programme: we go out in prime time, the cherry on the company cake; at the end of the day people like Le Iene because of the high degree of freedom it has always demanded. The impression is that, at Mediaset, they like us a lot, and at the same time they’re dead scared of what we might get up to. What is the real news value of the new free and creative media, like internet? The things you learn best are the things you learn one on one: in an individual relationship you get maximum communication, when you meet someone who knows how to talk to you. If it’s a group situation, communication is on ‘minimum’. Part of the internet is based on individual relations, where communication is excellent. But it’s the quality of communication that makes the difference, not the medium you are using. There are some great news programmes that know how to communicate and others that are useless, just don’t know how to do it. There are some great internet sites and some useless ones. Can there be such a thing as accurate and impartial news reporting? It doesn’t exist and cannot exist. I realized this when I was young. When I was twenty I worked as cultural assistant in a psychiatric hospital in Mantova. It was at the time when they were closing down that kind of institution and we were trying to liven them up a bit. I was working on a job based on pictures: a hundred photos of the hospital that I showed to all the people living in the home: nurses, doctors, patients... Everybody had to write a caption. Fifty people, fifty surreal and contrasting points of view for every photo. Each individual described the place starting out from himself, with a self-referring point of view. Why should news reporting be any different?

YOUNG WORDS HAPPENING - September 22, 23, and 24, 2005 - Torino, Italy www.comune.torino.it/treguaolimpica [email protected]