The broadcast of a TV interview in which a man confessed to a news reporter that he had murdered his mother has caused a row over media ethics in Italy.
Lorenzo Carbone, 50, made the confession outside his home in Spezzano di Fiorano, a town in the province of Modena in the Emilia-Romagna region, during the interview aired on the Mediaset talkshow Pomeriggio5 on Monday afternoon.
Visibly distressed, he replied to questions from the reporter Fabio Giuffrida. Carbone said his mother had been living with dementia and that he “couldn’t take it any longer”. “I strangled her, I don’t know why I did it. Every now and then she made me angry as she kept repeating herself.”
Police had been searching for him since Sunday, when the body of Loretta Levrini was found in her bed by her daughter. Carbone said he fled to Pavullo, a nearby town, where he walked the streets before returning to the home he had shared with his mother.
The journalist, whose crew had found the murder suspect outside his home by chance during their coverage of the story, immediately called the police. Tagged “Exclusive”, the interview, along with Carbone’s arrest on suspicion of murder, was broadcast a few minutes later on the show presented by Myrta Merlino.
Merlino came under fire for choosing to run the interview. “What happened today on Pomeriggio5 is very serious,” Gaia Tortora, the deputy director of the TV channel TG La7, wrote on X. “This is not our job. Tearing up the code of ethics, we are hitting rock bottom.”
Ermes Antonucci, a journalist with Il Foglio newspaper, questioned the need to broadcast an interview “with a man in an evident state of confusion”. “Wasn’t it enough to call the police, as was fortunately done, and then explain what happened, without airing the video? The media circus has reached a real low point.”
Merlino told Corriere della Sera she had “reasoned as a journalist” in choosing to air the video and would do the same again. “I received a call from the correspondent a few minutes before going live,” she added. “I had little time to decide. I only care about one thing: that it doesn’t damage the investigation. The man was wanted. The police were called and authorised me to broadcast the images of the interview.”
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The interview was broadcast on the same day a high-profile femicide trial opened in Venice after the brutal murder of the university student Giulia Cecchettin, 22, in November last year. Her former partner, Filippo Turetta, has previously confessed before a judge to the murder. Official statistics show that a woman is killed every three days in Italy.
