Then came the seven in the evening and in many homes the request was exclusively one: “Put on Rete 4”. To tune in to the Tg4 were above all opponents, enemies, people who detested that news. This would be enough to tell Emilio Fede, attractor like few others, capable of transforming his small newsletter into a vast daily stage.

Let’s talk clearly: nobody was looking for him to inquire. Curiosity was all in what he would say and how he would say it, perhaps after a slip or an electoral defeat by Berlusconi.

His TG4 was a more unique than rare case and stopped being such when he was normalized, after the painful divorce of 2012. Because faith was the sun, the shiny star who radiated you regardless of how I thought it.

Hyper-partisan, very lined up and at the limit of the speck, Emilio was hypnotic

Hyper-partisan, very lined up and at the limit of the speck, Emilio was hypnotic, as well as being equipped with an extraordinary talent. He led to his feet, from a study without scenography, with the only videowall behind him called to send the photos of the characters that he was discussing. In doing so, Berlusconi always appeared smiling and rejuvenated, while he lasted in horrible poses, punctually whirlwind.

It mattered, because the center of the world was him, with his gaze, his mimicry, his pauses and the names of the astutely wrong and crippled rivals. Like when at the time of the G8 in Genoa, the protesters Agnoletto and Casarini were renamed “Agnolotto” and “Casareccio”.

The clashes with Nanni Moretti and Roberto Benigni

In 2002 Nanni Moretti from the stage of Piazza Navona called him “squadrista who beats on the head of people who watch TV”. The director justified himself by stating that it was “a metaphorical phrase” and faith, as an excellent show man as he was, he came across a whole news giving the “imbecile” to Moretti, except to add a “metaphorically speaking” every time.

Moretti who, in the film “April”, had told his first rod, smoked on the evening of Berlusconi’s triumph in 1994, while on TV he looked at faith. Roberto Benigni was not tender, who in the formidable theatrical show “TuttoBenigni 1995-1996” went down hard: “I don’t get jokes about Emilio Fede, it’s like shooting on the Red Cross. I love him as if it were normal. He is not just any journalist, he is director of Tg4”. And when asked why it was there, he gave himself the answer: “In my opinion Silvio put it there to help all those children with development and depressed problems: ‘Mom I will never become anyone’. Then the mother at 7 pm tunes on to Rete 4: ‘Look, my son, the one there is director’. At that point one feels authorized to get the head”.

Before the landing for Fininvest, Faith had been many other things

However, before the landing at Fininvest, Faith had been many other things, often ignored or forgotten by the overwhelming wave that he helped to make up in the nineties. Hiring very young in Rai, he remained there until 1987. Special correspondent in Africa for eight years (hence the nickname ‘Skipon the African’ for the costs of his trips), conductor and director of Tg1. It was he who conceived the direct 18-hour no-stop to Vermicino to document Alfino Rmpi’s drama. “It has never been understood that it was born to enhance solidarity, not despair,” he explained some time later. “We wanted to tell the tears, the prayers, the desire to save life, make hope, the duty and therefore the joy of saving”.

The relationship with state TV ended abruptly following a gambling process from which it came out completely acquitted. Stayed, he first accepted the offer of Rete A, where he founded the first national private news of Italian television and, subsequently, let himself be courted by the Knight.

As a director of Studio Open, the night between 16 and 17 January 1991 I will always open the monopoly of the Rai news. The program, born the day before as a journalistic study on the crisis in the Gulf, made the bang. “Ready, ready, they attacked – Silvia Kramar screamed on the phone – Baghdad’s sky is full of fires”. The secret was the use of the phone, instead of the satellite, as on the contrary, Rai did, forced to set certain times for the connections.

The nose for the news and the ability to arrive in front of the others did not fade even on September 11, 2001. At 3.12 pm of what seemed like an anonymous and boring Tuesday, Faith appeared on the air with an unlikely ocher color jacket. From the second attack on the twin towers, just nine minutes had passed: “very serious disaster, perhaps an attack, still not knowing. Two planes crashed against the World Trade Center in the heart of New York”.

The tear with Mediaset

But Emilio loved to get lost in the ‘rest’. Perfect victim of “jokes aside”, he was even an accomplice of brilliant mockery, such as the one signed by “The Great Bluff” against Natalia Estrada. Not to mention the “investigation into the make -up song”, a fake special inquiry broadcast in February 1998 against the Sanremo Festival. In that circumstance he announced the arrest of Iva Zanicchi, with the images of the detention commented by Pupo, Giuliano Ferrara and Alba Parietti. It was all fake and Zanicchi herself had to get out of the dressing room to reassure family members at home. An internal storm broke out at Mediaset and the company’s journalists were especially forgotten. Enrico Mentana spoke of “Holiday”, Michele Santoro (who on Italy 1 was at the helm of “Moby Dick”) did not use the least terms: “A cabaret operation, with a moralistic intervention that generated ridiculous effects, entrusted to those who for a job should be guarantor of the goodness of the news transmitted. The use of the medium, unlike the famous case of Orson Welles and his chronicle Marziani has not been exalted, but limited, poor and predictable.

He came out unharmed, even strengthened. Miracle that was not repeated on March 29, 2012, the day of the drastic and definitive removal. “I have never seen this company to fire someone,” he declared with an ostentatious smile on his lips. However, he could not in front of the cold press release of Mediaset: “After a negotiation for the consensual termination of the employment relationship that did not have a good purpose, Emilio Fede leaves the company. Mediaset thanks him for the work done in many years of collaboration and for the contribution ensured at the birth of the group information”.

The End and Coda titles on a partnership that seemed indissoluble. The involvement in the Ruby-Gate, the condemnation for aiding and abetting prostitution, an accusation of recycling for the alleged attempt to pay 2.5 million in the bank of Lugano and a sad story of hot photomontages concerning the leaders of Mediaset, made the deep and incurable tear.

A Mediaset would no longer have reappeared, except within the only episode of “Radio Belva”, as sent to a Communist Refoundation headquarters, and of “Striscia la Notizia”, ​​to whom Faith owes the gift of eternity. His outlaws will remain, his outbursts (assiduously fomented by his editorial staff) and that “which figure of shit” that has become meme, practically perfect in the timbre, in the metric and in the intonation.

Faith was a lot, it was all, it was too much.