Il crime, pain, the horror , violence in television are they always "welcome" topics for the general television audience? It seems so and three recent news items confirm a trend that has been consolidated for decades and reopened a never-ending debate.Crime, television-wise, always pays well.
It started a few days ago Made of black: a new free-to-air channel entirely dedicated to the "crime" genre where the entire schedule is dedicated to crime news more or less recent and to major unsolved court cases. The second news item refers to an “extension” of Beasts, a successful program on Rai Due hosted by Francesca Fagnani, which will deal with "crime" by applying the format of the main broadcast: interview with one of the subjects directly involved in a case of great judicial uproar. The third news item that has overlapped with great media attention is the update of the well-known story of theMurder of Chiara Poggi in Garlasco.
In our country, it all started way back in July of 1981 when the little one Alfredino Rampi fell into the Vermicino well , Rai, on all networks, broadcast the live TV broadcast for about 61 hours, followed by over 21 million viewers. Then the so-called "TV of pain" was born, all aimed at soliciting, at responding to a feeling rooted in human nature: to witness human tragedies from the outside as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay In the face of the pain of others. Since then, television has done nothing but bring tragic images and dramatic moments of all kinds to prime time, in the comfort of your living room, with only one goal: to speculate on "ratings".
It is worth remembering a famous “Minerva's Envelope” signed by Umberto Eco with the title “Give us our daily crime today” where he concluded with an iconic phrase: “A nice sequence of severed heads keeps people happy and doesn’t give them bad ideas for the boss”. Perhaps a slightly exaggerated concept but not far from everyday television reality. He recently declared to L'Espresso Roberta Petrelluzzi, the well-known presenter of A day in the Magistrates Court, broadcast on RaiTre for many years now: “Crime news and the origin of evil have always interested everyone, but since it was understood how much it affects the ratings, a race has been unleashed to capture the public's attention, digging into the most gruesome, intriguing and prurient details. What really seems to matter is the bloody detail".
Since then, television has brought us to the crime scene both in the world and in the real way that in that of the TV series. While the real protagonists were on video in the news and entertainment programs, in parallel the “crime story” series were aired that made the fortune of many networks and broadcasters: from Circeo crime a Gomorrah, CSI a Criminale Romance.
From Vermicino onwards, the great season of horror on TV began, of individual and collective tragedies, of crime, of the various "television" monsters, often close to or within the same families where the crimes took place. The list is long and we only recall the most famous ones: from the monster of Florence to Cogne (with the memorable model of the villa presented in the studio by Bruno Vespa), from the massacre of Erba to that of Novi Ligure, from the crime of Perugia to that of Avetrana to arrive, precisely, at the recent reopening of the crime of Chiara Poggi. All have in common, in addition to the courtrooms, the cameras constantly turned on.
What is the situation today in generalist tv networks, what has changed since what happened way back in 1981? The “news” is that we know little. The available scientific literature is scarce: little data, little research and little debate and analysis. It seems that on this ground there is a sort of silence to delve deeper, to understand why this phenomenon is highlighted and what effects it is able to produce on the collective perception of “crime”, in particular towards young people. We do not know with mathematical certainty how much space on average the news dedicates in their most listened to edition, the evening one, to the distribution of genres and therefore how many minutes are dedicated to “crime” and yet it is easy to see that the page on this topic is always full and it is transversal between the public and private broadcasters.
The consequence is that the theme, the question we posed at the beginning, is largely unanswered. The only reliable and recent source, still a fundamental point of reference on the topic, is the research carried out by the Pavia Observatory in 2014 on the topic "The television of pain” which affected all the programmes broadcast over the course of three months (15 September – 15 December 2014) on the seven main national broadcasters: Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3, Rete 4, Canale 5, Italia 1 and La7. In summary, these are some essential data:
- Il attention span dedicated to news stories and related comments or debates in the studio on the networks observed is equal to a total of 287 hours (3 hours per day on average).
- The type of cases that receive the widest attention are those relating to murders and disappeared: 79% of the total time is dedicated to the two types. The two categories lend themselves, by their nature, to serialization, through the narration of the developments of the investigations, of the different phases of the judicial proceedings in progress and the related debates.
- The broadcasters that pay more attention to crime news are Rai1, with True stories e Life live, and Channel 5, with Morning Five e Afternoon Five. The time that these two networks dedicate to these topics amounts to 70% of the total.
- I “cases” on which television attention is focused in the period under examination are relatively few and tend to be re-proposed in a logic of seriality, continuously over time, even in the absence of real developments in the story.
In conclusion, it is worth reporting a AGCom resolution of 2008 on the television representation of current crime and judicial issues that are still highly topical: “Judicial reporting must always respect the principles of objectivity, completeness, correctness and impartiality of information and protection of human dignity, avoiding among other things transforming private pain into a public spectacle that amplifies the suffering of the victims and avoiding aspects of spectacularization that could lead to any form of “divinization” of the suspect, the accused or other subjects of the trial”.
