The question that tests journalistic ethics in relation to Fratelli d'Italia

This Sunday, Italy is experiencing a day of general elections that has made nervous the centrist and leftist politicians and their related media.

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The good poll forecasts for the Fratelli d'Italia party are causing some to lose sleep. As has happened on other occasions, these media have spent days trying to scare us by warning that the "far-right" could govern Italy. It is a very crude manipulation, since as I pointed out here yesterday, Fratelli d'Italia is a democratic and conservative party, not a "far-right" party. But it seems that for many media the right no longer exists: if you're not leftist or centrist, then you're a "far-right". It's a clear way of trying to manipulate their audience.

In these cases, journalistic ethics when it comes to qualifying conservative political options can be tested with a simple question: the media that call Fratelli d'Italia "far-right" also called "far-left" the Greek communists of Syriza and the Spanish communists of Podemos? We are talking about a party that governed in Greece and another party that is part of a coalition government with the socialists in Spain.

In the case of Podemos, it is a party that has ties to dictatorships such as Iran and Venezuela and that has justified aggressions against political rivals. Likewise, last year, both Podemos and their socialist allies of the PSOE voted against a condemnation of communism's crimes of genocide in a vote held in the Spanish Parliament. How many European media that now describe Fratelli d'Italia as "far-right" have reported on all these things?

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Photo: Reuters.