Rai narrates Italy: Current affairs, television information and changing times

This essay explores the role that the RAI (Italian Public Radio-Television) could still play in the current Italian socio-cultural scenario. Celebrating the Italian public service broadcasting’s history 60 years after its birth, television personalities and managers are more important than ever, and it is becoming equally important to question the RAI’s capability to function as narrative machine, an archive of the national memory and as reference point of Italian identity. Current affairs are, in general, the most representative PSB television genre. This article will attempt to propose and analyze the main trends in the informative programs and, in particular, to show those programs most representative of several historical periods. Indeed, through contamination with other genres (Gavrila 2010), public affairs is the most significant television genre that vaunts the strength to re-generate itself in times of television crisis. Innovation in current affairs programming draws its roots mainly from the ‘laboratory’ of the 1970s and 1980s, while the last two decades are dominated by politics and repetitivity. Indeed, since the 1990s, RAI talk shows and current affairs programs have been increasingly linked to politics, both in terms of political implications and topics selection.