The View from Bologna
An occasional column for Three Monkeys Online.
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November 01, 2006
Drug Crazed Parliamentarians Protect Privacy
The story goes like this: Le Iene, an irreverent investigative/satirical programme (which given the restrictive nature of Italian TV is no mean feat), posing as a team from a fictional TV channel, outside Italy’s Parliament building Palazzo Chigi, do on the spot interviews with 50 parliamentarians from across the party spectrum. During the interview, one of the production team intervenes, saying that there’s some sweat glistening on the politicians forehead, and thus wipes it off using a handkerchief. In the handkerchief, though, is a special drug testing device (used by police forces across Europe, including Italy) which can indicate whether the subject tested has taken any of a variety of controlled substances within the previous 48 hours.
A sneaky trick, no doubt, but the results, while less than scientific, were interesting, to say the least. Out of a sample 50 politicians tested, over one third tested positive for illegal drugs (prohibited high of preference cannabis, closely followed by cocaine). The point the programme makers were, presumably, making was that there’s more than a little hypocrisy involved with a legislature that under the previous government approved one of the harshest drug prohibition laws in Europe. While much of Europe is rethinking the strategy of strict prohibition of ‘soft’ drugs, Italy last year decided to re-adopt harsh measures across the board.
This, though, is not the point of our tabloid-scream headline today. The official reaction to the programme’s stunt is what we’re concerned with. The programme, in order to drum up publicity for its first show of the season, issued a press release with details of their improviso hoax. Most major papers carried the story, and thus the news that a percentage of Italy’s moral guardians are prone to a bit of recreational drug use was, in a sense, no news. Come the day of the programme, though, the official body set up to ensure compliance with Italy’s extensive privacy laws, ruled that the programme could not show the piece.
“Fair is fair,” you mutter guiltily under your possibly narcotic tinted breath, “no-one should be subjected to sly drug testing outside their place of work”. Well, perhaps not (although athletes are subject to random drug testing) , but let’s clarify Le Iene’s test and its scope. After the requisite sample was slyly taken, it was added with all the others, with no distinguishing marks - so no-one, including the production team, would know who tested positive and who negative. A test, then, with a simple statistical goal. How one could further protect the parliamentarians’ privacy, short of not doing the test, is beyond this monkey.
A legal investigation has been opened, with three of the programme’s production being accused of violation of privacy.
While, during the same week, readers of La Repubblica were informed that British journalists would no longer be at risk of libel charges in cases where stories can be proved to be of public interest, Italy’s privacy laws were invoked for the umpteenth time in recent months to obstruct journalists and programme makers from investigating stories in the public interest
Posted by 3Monkeys at November 1, 2006 06:53 PM
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