RAI Removes Sigfrido Ranucci From Report After a Decade, and Italian Politics Splits Exactly Along Party Lines

RAI confirmed on August 29 that Sigfrido Ranucci will no longer host Report, the investigative program he has anchored for a decade, offering him a move to RAI News, the Tg3 news desk or a foreign correspondent post instead. Ranucci is 64, has lived under police protection since 2021 over threats tied to his reporting on organized crime and political corruption, and Report under his direction broke the reporting that eventually forced the resignations of two government ministers, Gennaro Sangiuliano and Daniela Santanche.

RAI's stated grounds for the move center on Ranucci's friendship with the businessman Valter Lavitola, who has confessed to organizing a bomb attack outside Ranucci's home in October 2025. Prosecutors believe Lavitola ordered that attack to boost his own political standing rather than to harm Ranucci, a detail that complicates rather than clarifies why the friendship became grounds for removing the man who was bombed. RAI has also pointed to an unproven allegation of a consensual relationship with an intern and unsubstantiated claims of harassment against female staff, both of which Ranucci denies.

The political reaction split almost exactly along government and opposition lines. Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini welcomed the decision and called for clarity, and Senate President Ignazio La Russa said he was happy at the news, while Fratelli d'Italia's Federico Mollicone argued Report's investigations had disproportionately targeted the governing coalition. On the other side, Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein said the right had achieved exactly what it was aiming for, and critics revived the nickname TeleMeloni for a RAI they accuse of answering to the prime minister rather than to viewers, a charge M5S senator Barbara Floridia framed as the result of what she called the Meloni Edict.

Inside RAI itself the reaction has been less predictable than the party split outside it. Report's editorial committee warned the decision exploited gaps in the broadcaster's internal rules, and newsroom staff have threatened mass resignation over it. Multiple journalists' unions have raised alarm, and even the choice of Ranucci's replacements, Giulia Presutti, 36, and Daniele Pirvincenzi, 45, has drawn internal resistance rather than support, suggesting the discomfort with how this was handled is not confined to Report's usual political critics.

Ranucci has said he will pursue legal action and continue fighting for press freedom, describing the coverage around his removal as character assassination he called perhaps unprecedented in the country's history. He was blunter about his successors, calling their appointment a slap in the face to meritocracy and to the program's history. Whatever RAI's formal reasoning, a journalist who spent a decade investigating the people now cheering his removal has left both sides of Italian politics saying, for once, exactly what they think of each other's media.