Same role in the script, similar interpretations, but also some key differences. Elena Basile and Alessandro Orsini – protagonists in the last hours between Piazzapulita and E’ semper Carta bianca – are the media product of a pattern that television information now resorts to with compulsive repetition. In the complex and detailed debate surrounding a war, first Russia’s war against Ukraine and then Hamas’s war against Israel, an issue is talked about because it says what it says and, above all, because it agrees with it after is necessary. An expert on the subject or a self-proclaimed expert who becomes a character and helps make the complexities being told more understandable to an audience that also needs confrontation and dramatic confrontations to choose their program and not the channel switch.
What do they say, Donbass and the Gaza Strip?
The theses advocated by Orsini have now been metabolized and well codified. The fulcrum of the argument is the Western responsibilities in the long-term game over Donbass, as well as the reasons that should lead Italy to isolate itself from the positions of the European Union and come to terms with Putin.
The professor, who comes from Luiss, but who seems to have an increasingly complicated relationship with Confindustria University, argues his pro-Russian theses, always starting from two main factors: the invasion of Ukraine, which is seen as an inevitable consequence of the mistakes made, and the presumed convenience in accepting the violent operation ordered by Moscow and accepting its consequences.
Basile’s appearance in the spotlight is more recent and is linked to the sensational development of the Middle East issue following the Hamas attack on Israel. The basic thesis is that when we talk about the crimes committed by the Palestinian organization, we must take into account the decades of oppression in the Gaza Strip, the responsibility of Israel, as well as that of Europe and the United States, which essentially allowed these years. A point of view often seasoned with dramatic provocations and lessons in international relations and journalism, conveyed with great ease.
The enemy outside the mainstream: Ukraine and Israel
There is another quality that Orsini and Basile have in common. Both have identified an enemy different from the one they perceive in the narrative that they consider to be the “mainstream” of the facts they comment on. With extreme clarity and a simplification that apparently ignores the actual desire to radicalize one’s own image. Orsini had immediately targeted Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine, destroying the almost unanimously shared dynamic by which an aggressor, Putin’s Russia, breaks every rule of international law and invades a free country.
The immediate step is to question the Atlantic positions, drawing on the traditional anti-American anecdote. Basile draws attention to the history of Israel, at a time when the deaths caused by Hamas on Israeli territory are still being felt and solidarity with the consequences of a terrorist attack of enormous proportions is the first for the majority of people with common sense ” “spontaneous” feeling is of abuse. And she also adds the terrible sentence about the American hostages, who are “too few” to be able to change the actions of the United States.
As they say, the mask of the countercurrent hero
Orsini and Basile, despite their different backgrounds and ages, also share a connection to life before sudden television fame. The Luiss professor considers her academic career to be “destroyed in the truest sense of the word,” the former diplomat writes and comments today, while the diplomats’ union quickly distances itself and points out that “she never reached the highest level of her career, which is one constitutes improper use.” The title of ambassador would lead to presumption.
Both feel comfortable in the role of the “against the grain” hero, the mask they want to wear. Orsini feels like the guardian of a truth that others do not know, while Basile emphasizes several times, especially in his recent appearance in Piazza Pulita, that it is up to her to say what others do not say.
A key difference is how far removed they are from reality
However, there is at least one key difference between the two characters. It’s not about them directly, but about the distance between reality and the theses they represent. Orsini turns it around and invokes complexity to mitigate the obvious, certified responsibility of Putin and Russia in the conflict with Ukraine. Basile forces reality to trivialize it in some passages in order to support his thesis, but the complexity he speaks of is a fact of the Palestinian question, in an attempt to separate the responsibilities of Hamas terrorists from those of Hamas -Separating terrorists cannot be ignored. The Palestinian people must reach solutions that do not represent the start of a larger conflict. (By Fabio Insenga)
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