Radio Radicale
Radio Radicale is the official radio station of the Italian Radical Party.
Founded in 1976 as part of the Radio libere movement, it has no commercial advertisements and is partly funded by the party, with support from the Italian government as part of an agreement for the broadcasting of Parliamentary sessions.
Despite being an official political party organ, Radio Radicale dedicates its airtime to broadcasting parliamentary live debates from the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the Italian Senate as well as important court cases. It broadcasts Italian political party conventions of all political spectrums, from far right to far left. The remaining airtime is used for programs about current events relevant to the political beliefs of the Radical Party.
In December 2008, Radio Radicale was awarded by Italia Oggi as "best specialized radio broadcaster".
History
Radio Radicale was founded between 1975 and 1976 by a group belonging to the Radical Party in a small apartment near Villa Pamphili, in the Gianicolense district of Rome.Following the liberalization of radio broadcasting by the Constitutional Court between 1974 and 1976, and the spread of small private radio stations, Radio Radicale was known for its use of low-cost equipment but it stood out for its particular philosophy. Radio Radicale set out to create a valid public service alternative to the state broadcaster RAI, using the name “Radicale”, an original programme where listeners could express their opinions about various themes. The programme was interrupted by the court after one month and the deputy prosecutor Pietro Saviotti signed a seizure decree of the answering machines on 14 August, because listeners had committed crimes like contempt of the institutions and apology of fascism. After two months, the Parliament intervened and extended the public funding for Party publishing to the radio stations, which forced Radio Radicale to officially become a Party branch. The initiative of uncensored phone calls was repeated in 1991 and 1993.
The official website was created in 1998, expanding the station’s audio programming with multimedia content. The full archive was placed online for free download.
Recent events
In 1997, the Prodi I Cabinet refused to renew the agreement with Radio Radicale for the broadcast of parliamentary sessions and RAI began to develop its own dedicated radio station 7 years since the law which instituted it. Important cultural and political personalities asked the government to consider the so-called "Mammì bill"—which obliged Rai to create a parliamentary radio channel—null and void. The proposal was to extend the agreement with Radio Radicale for another 3 years, and to allow for a call for tender when the contract would come up for renewal.Following a political debate with demonstrations and nonviolent initiatives by the Radicals, the Parliament approved the law Nº 224 of 11 July 1998 concerning Radio broadcasting of Parliament's work and benefits for publishing. The law established the call for tender as a stipulation of the agreement and renewed the contract with Radio Radicale for another three years. RAI’s obligation to broadcast parliamentary sessions was kept, but the public company was prevented from extending its radio network until the entry into force of the telecommunications general reform.
In 2001, 2004 and 2006, the agreement with Radio Radicale was renewed according to the stipulations of the financial law. Under the contract, Radio Radicale has to broadcast, between 8 am and 9 pm, at least 60% of the annual total number of hours dedicated by the Parliament to the sessions in the chambers. Those broadcasts cannot be interrupted, preceded or followed, for a period of thirty minutes from their beginning and their end, by commercial or political advertisements.
Renewal of the agreement (2010–2013)
For 2010 and 2011, the agreement with the Ministry of Economic Development included a €9.9 million funding for Centro di produzione S.p.a. For 2012, two laws of 2011 allowed a total expenditure of €10 million and for 2013 the same amount was confirmed in 2012.Renewal in 2018-2019
Up to 2018, Radio Radicale received €8.2 million, according to the agreement with the Ministry of Economic Development for the broadcast of parliamentary sessions, and another €4 million as acontribution to their publishing activities.The 2019 budget law has prolonged the agreement for the parliamentary session broadcasting by Radio Radicale for only one semester, allocating €5 million gross for the year 2019.
Governance
Centro di Produzione SpA is the publisher of Radio Radicale, its archive and of its website. The company, headquartered in Rome, has the following shareholders:- Pannella List: 62.85%
- Sequenza SpA: 25.00%
- Cecilia Maria Angioletti: 6.00%
- Centro di Produzione SpA: 6.15%
Technologies
Radio Radicale is available also in streaming through the website and an official app for smartphones, offering also additional multimedia content.
It is a member of the consortium DAB Italia for the development and diffusion of DAB technologies in Italy.
Organization
Hours of audio and video recordings are made every year through a system of connections with public institutions and events. Signals are received through fixed or temporary lines by wire, radio, satellite or digital links and, when using analog telephone lines, recordings are immediately digitalised by an encoding system which produces ten channels at the same time around the clock. Once the signal reaches the main headquarters, the different signals are diffused through an active matrix system which allows the distribution of 128 signals.Centro di Produzione S.p.A. is the owner of the headquarters where Radio Radicale operates, and includes three studios. Two of them have their own independent Radio director, while the third is connected with two director and it is mainly dedicated to post-production. All four studios can broadcast.
In addition to the main studios, the broadcaster has four production centres where transfers, minor editing and telephone interview recordings are made. Telephone lines used for conversations to be aired are digitalised and all recordings have been made in MP3 format since July 2006.
Radio Radicale is organized through the following divisions:
- Journalistic direction
- Newsroom
- Administrative direction
- Administration
- Archive and Internet
- Technical sector
- Network checking
Archive
The constant work of document collection and preservation done by Radio Radicale during its activity has allowed the creation of an important and broad archive, defined in 1993 by the Archival Superintendency as being "of a remarkable historical interest". In the same year, the archive was quoted in the volume Fonti orali: censimento degli istituti di conservazione published by the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, while in the following year it was a subject of the Congresso sugli archivi dei partiti politici organized by the Central Archives of the State.The archive can be consulted freely and by everyone.
In May 2007, during the congress L'archivio multimediale di Radio Radicale: un patrimonio per la storia, l'informazione, la democrazia, organized by RR along with the Doctorate of Research on European History and the Archivists and Librarists Special School of the Sapienza University of Rome, various critics and archivist agreed in recognizing not only the historical and social value of the archival production of Radio Radicale, but also its complementarity with the main collections of Italian documents, first of all those belonging to RAI. The former manager of Rai Teche, Barbara Scaramucci, stated that:
Others testified to the uniqueness of the public service done by a private radio station like Radio Radicale. Paola Carucci, councillor of the President of Italian Republic for the Historical Archive, claims:
The choice of Marco Pannella to preserve, catalogue and archive all the recordings without any manipulations on tapes allows the citizens to consult 430 000 documents, which contains the most important events of the institutional, political, social and cultural history of Italy: there are full recordings which allow to everyone to know and relive an event in its entirety. The archive of the radio is in continuous expansion and receives every day tens of new documents which are added to those already existing.
History
The history of the archive is closely linked with Radio Radicale which preserved every cassette and tape of the aired programmes since its first broadcasting in 1976. However, the archive owns also some records done before 1976 and precisely 52 tapes and 216 cassettes for the period from 1967 - 1975, in addition to some tapes of 1941, some of 1960 and others of 1966.The proper archive thought of as a service with its own specialized staff was established three years after the start of Radio activities, so that the sorting of collected recordings has started since 1979. In 1987 the classification and archive changed with the introduction of computer systems and today the analog documentation is at an advanced digitalization. The director of the archive has been Gabriella Fanello Marcucci since 1992.