The best meme circulating on social media depicts Nicola Gratteri with a cell phone in her hand while reading a recipe for carbonara with cream. Subheading: “A serious chef sent it to me.” The reference is the worst hole made by Napoli prosecutors to justify a fake interview with Falcone conducted live on La7 as evidence of the judge’s rejection of career separation.
In fact, when interviewed by Foglio, the judge leading No Front to justice reform explained: “I read the fake interview that Floris did because serious people sent it to me. They are people who are authorities in the information sector, they reported it to me as a genuine interview and I read it”. In short, a single mea culpa that feels more like an abdication of responsibility. Similarly, it was the choice of the newspaper Repubblica (where the fake interview with Falcone was published on January 25, 1992) to hide the correction on its website, despite writing verbatim: “The interview is false, it was never conducted, Falcone is not hostile to the career separation hypothesis”.
Even Peter Gomez, director of the Il Fatto website, sprinkled ashes on his head: “It is an obligation to admit your mistakes when you are a journalist.”
But it is less clear that Marco Travaglio, director of the Daily Fatto, the first newspaper to circulate the hoax about the murdered judge in Capaci and about the participation of the ghost of Paolo Borsellino in the Samarcanda program on May 23, 1991, would write an editorial containing the exclusive. “When we make mistakes, unlike the charlatans who knowingly tell about twenty lies a day, we apologize to our readers. And we do so today for taking two incorrect quotes from Falcone and Borsellino at face value, taken from written and online publications,” Travaglio wrote. Yang then goes on to argue that “Falcone’s statement in favor of a separate career as long as prosecutors do not pass under the executive reflects his thoughts repeated several times, but not taken from a 92 interview with Repubblica”.
But all without citing any sources. You just have to trust Travaglio. However, we take the liberty of suggesting two authoritative and reliable sources who argue otherwise: Falcone himself.
In the book Interventions and Proposals 1982-1992 published by Sansoni together with the Giovanni and Francesca Falcone Foundation, the judge actually wrote: “I have a painful realization that the career management of public prosecutor judges can no longer be equated with that of magistrate judges, because their function and therefore their talents, mental habits, required professional skills are different: prosecutors are investigators, judges are dispute referees.”
In an interview in Repubblica in 1991, which actually exists, Falcone stated: “Anyone, like me, who demands that the judge and the prosecutor be two figures structurally differentiated in terms of skill and career, is branded as an enemy of the independence of the judge, yearning for the discretion of criminal action, wanting to place the prosecutor under executive control”.
On social media, on TV, on Gratteri’s phone and so on
However, in the Travaglio newspaper, these expressions did not exist and did not circulate. It’s a shame, but you can’t have it all, it’s already something that at least two of the fake news stories were partially blown up by the same people who lit the fuse.
