For a few weeks I have been following Zuppa di Porro, on Facebook, the video press review of the journalist Nicola Porro . The formula seemed intriguing to me: speed of execution, freedom of expression, and redemption for a journalist who saw his comfort zone, the excellent Virus program he ran, canceled by Rai. But things did not go that way. I lived the first seven days of disappointment, and the following seven of growing irritation, due to the tones of an umbrella grinder and the indignation shameless gaiety with which the chosen titles are commented every morning.
Yesterday Porro took a step further, maybe he woke up late, maybe he didn’t understand why he was already loaded like a spring. In short, he got the news wrong. And it still stuck to it. For which I now take the liberty of denouncing his verbal dysentery rather than disagree. Porro has mortified his potentially beautiful eight-minute column to untie the dogs of an ungrateful Muslim Mayor of London, who, according to the Corriere, has banned the advertisements he considers “unhealthy” along the 400 kilometers of the London Underground. Says the mayor, Labor Sadiq Kahn: “As the father of two teenage girls, I am extremely concerned about this type of advertising which can dishearten people, especially young girls, and make them feel ashamed of their own bodies.”
The former host of Virus found his own personal reason for controversy by focusing attention on the Muslims of the first citizen, which he believed was the trigger for the institutional stance. But his catilinary came out rickety, as well as not very honest. He began by saying “There is a model who made a billboard”; and finally he asked himself, in the name of his liberal culture “who decides what is unhealthy
” Abutere patientia nostra …
Obviously the model did not “make” any billboards, and decide if something that occupies public space is unhealthy and precisely the thankless task of those who administer it. But above all Porro has forgotten to say two things, or has not noticed. First, that the advertising and the advertisement of a dietetic product, and therefore with an intent and a potential impact not so neutral; second, which is from last year. The colored photo and a reading of the article made with the hair still on her face must have screwed him.
The billboard depicted a model, Renee Somerfield , in a yellow bikini, surrounded by the words “Are you – beach body ready
”, And at the time it had been the subject of long and sharp controversies at home because of the influence it could have had on the idea of“ aesthetically correct ”of young English women. The Guardian wrote about it on June 27, 2015, and the correspondent from New York also sent a report in which she asked passers-by in Times Square, where an identical poster was located, what their impression of her was. Then, to follow, the Telegraph, the BBC, the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Huffington Post. What emerged was a question of health, the cleaver of anorexia, and one of culture, being prone to the commercial hand that knocks it down on women – and also on men – with the ominous power of persuasion ( Vance Packardwrote about sixty years ago). Quite Western issues, because at that time Khan was not at London City Hall. Nothing: “What are 400 formal protests in a city like London
?”
Yet in yesterday morning’s Corriere the news were all there, as well as Kahn’s rather secular statement, “no one should feel influenced, when traveling on the Tube, or on the bus, by unrealistic expectations regarding the body”; he also wrote that billposting requests will be evaluated by a committee, within Transport For London, made up of advertisers and members of civil society “reflecting the diversity of London”. Porro forgot to mention this evidence as well.
We have the impression that Porro has been devoured by the screen that he himself created, he who skillfully tamed the one who paid him: and this is the virus that affects journalists. It is a virus that has your face and, while it eats you, whispers that it will always remain you. The disease manifests itself when you get a fixed idea, usually the one that makes the most readers at that moment, and with the ability and in the time of a reversal to the Word – nomen omen – you make a crusade. When the week changes, you change the crusade. Yesterday, Kahn equal Muslim equal enemy of freedom equal enemy of women, very enemy of models. He’ll be right (Porro I mean, not Kahn
It depends if the purpose was to say something or to harangue and excite its 90,000-odd readers (read the comments at the bottom of his post-review, the mission is accomplished). Freedom is too fine a thing for a man screaming into a camera.
Not even be a noble signature and a vaccine. Massimo Gramellini , on the same theme, writes in the Press: “The problem is not the posters. And the lack of self-esteem of those who, looking at them, compare them to themselves and suffer from it ”. That is: that they take care, and let us look at the beautiful tope in peace. It is true that witch hunts are not the solution to these problems, but turning their backs is the solution, that the summer woman wants lightness, and thus also pull the sprint to those who leverage it for money
Gramellini, aware that his 22 lines end quickly, for his gggente chooses to throw her in caciara: “They asked the mayor to burn the advertisements of males with lion mane: I feel discriminated against in my baldness. And those that advertise luxury items, because even the vision of a custom-built car makes those who are not in a position to afford it feel inadequate “. Unfortunately we have no news of baldness and poorly stuffed wallet as social diseases with lethal outcomes. And some of Porro’s followers judged Gramellinata “funny”.
Journalists are the GM of facts: these are almost always bent to bring them to one side instead of another. Unfortunately, the laboratory where gestation takes place is not sterile; so, even if you start paved with the intention to leave the world better than you found it, it happens that the harsh law of the public, the reasons of others and above all the virus take precedence over the rigor with which one should deal such a delicate means. And so, Porro ended up doing the same thing as advertising, pushing the listener to cerebral anorexia.
