Parole a processo. Il caso Erri De Luca

Erri De Luca is a famous Italian writer and intellectual. In January 2015 he was sued over charges of instigation to crime because of some statements he had made in support of No Tav, a movement based in the Piedmont region that has been fighting for years against the construction of a high speed railway, which No Tav accuses of being a threat to the local environment. Some newspapers reported a De Luca statement in which he sustained the legitimacy of sabotaging the construction sites of the railway. The way in which these statements were reported is very interesting for semiotics. The construction and report of the facts operated by the media helped move the focus from the violent confrontation occurred on the construction site between the Police and the No Tav activists to another topic of confrontation: censorship versus freedom of speech. Thus what some viewed as an instigation to violent protest was viewed by others as a legitimate expression of free speech. Such dualism also depended on the word “sabotaggio”, which, in Italian, means both sabotage through violent action and sabotage through passive resistance. These procedures for the construction of the sense and the subsequent spread in the media system, however, lead to a paradoxical phenomenon. Following the debate (and lawsuit) caused by De Luca's statements, his supporters denounced an attempt to censor and restrain freedom of speech. Yet, no such censorship ever happened in the media: De Luca's own subsequent defense of his right to freedom of speech had a large diffusion and, in fact, strengthened the circulation of his opinion about the No Tav movement within the media. This demonstrated the power of journalistic representation of the facts.