Italy's state broadcaster RAI confirmed Friday it is removing Sigfrido Ranucci as host of Report, the investigative program he has fronted for a decade — the same reporter who survived a car-bomb attack outside his home last October. [1] RAI offered the 64-year-old journalist three alternative postings "befitting his rank and experience": a role at RAI News, a slot at the news channel Tg3, or a foreign-correspondent position reportedly based in Cairo. Report will now be co-hosted by two younger RAI journalists, Giulia Presutti, 36, and Daniele Piervincenzi, 45. [1]
The timeline that produced Friday's decision runs directly through the bombing. Prosecutors allege businessman Valter Lavitola confessed to organizing the October 2025 attack that destroyed cars belonging to Ranucci and his daughter outside their home in Pomezia — not to harm Ranucci, prosecutors say, but to boost Lavitola's own political prospects, from which he hoped Ranucci's resulting public sympathy would benefit him. Four alleged bomb-planters were arrested in June; Lavitola himself was arrested in August, just weeks before RAI's decision. [1] Rather than closing the story in Ranucci's favor, the arrests opened a second front. Right-wing politicians and commentators seized on Ranucci's prior personal friendship with Lavitola to demand his removal, accusing him — without prosecutorial support — of failing to publicly condemn his own would-be attacker quickly enough, and of possibly knowing about the plot in advance. [1]
Lega leader and deputy premier Matteo Salvini led the campaign publicly and celebrated its outcome in a social media post Friday: "Now let's get some clarity." Senate president Ignazio La Russa, of Premier Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia, said he was "happy" at the news, describing Ranucci's programs as "absolutely specious and one-sided." Fratelli d'Italia MP Federico Mollicone offered a specific grievance behind the campaign's motive: he calculated that 43.5 percent of Report's investigations since the current government took office — 202 of 404 examined — targeted his party and the ruling coalition, against seven investigations into the opposition Partito Democratico and one into the Five Star Movement. [1] Under Ranucci, Report's exposés forced the resignations of two of Meloni's own ministers, former culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano and former tourism minister Daniela Santanchè — the record Mollicone's arithmetic is implicitly a complaint about. [1]
The opposition read Friday's move as confirmation of a broader argument it has been making about RAI itself. PD leader Elly Schlein said Ranucci's fate had been "already written": "The right achieved exactly what it was aiming for... TeleMeloni didn't even wait for the magistrates to shed light on what happened." Five Star senator Barbara Floridia, who resigned last month as president of parliament's RAI oversight commission citing a government-majority boycott, called the move the "Meloni Edict." [1] "TeleMeloni" — the opposition's term for what it calls Meloni's creeping control over state media — is not new vocabulary in Italian politics, but Friday's decision is the first time it has been attached to the removal of a program that survived an actual assassination attempt against its host.
Ranucci, who has not been accused of any crime, said he learned of his own dismissal from the ANSA wire service rather than from RAI directly. He described the preceding two months of coverage as "character assassination... perhaps unprecedented in the history of our country," attributing roughly 2,800 articles to newspapers owned by the Angelucci publishing group, headed by fellow Lega politician Antonio Angelucci — a detail that places the campaign against him inside the same political apparatus that celebrated its result. [1] Offered a foreign-correspondent posting in Cairo as one of his three alternatives, Ranucci drew a pointed comparison: "Perhaps they hope I might end up like Regeni," referencing Giulio Regeni, the Italian doctoral student abducted, tortured and murdered in Cairo in 2016. [1]
Report's own editorial committee, in a statement issued shortly before RAI's confirmation, said "politics is taking advantage of a regulatory vacuum" — noting the program has no formal editorial director, no dedicated masthead, and only limited union protection, leaving it structurally exposed to being overridden by exactly the kind of decision RAI made Friday. Italian media reported Report's journalists have threatened to resign en masse, and that the newsroom was not consulted on Presutti and Piervincenzi's selection as replacements. [1] Ranucci, who has lived under police protection since 2021 and saw his security detail expanded from two officers to six after the bombing, wrote Friday that the fight continues past the show he built: "I will no longer host Report, but I will lead the most important battle of my life: for press freedom." [1]
What Friday's coverage documents, more than it resolves, is a genuine dispute over causation that neither side can settle with the facts on the table: whether Ranucci was removed because of a personal association prosecutors say had nothing to do with him, or because Report's investigations produced two ministerial resignations and a lopsided tally of scrutiny that the government's own MPs were willing to count out loud.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin