During 2021 in Italy 301 information operators (journalists, bloggers, photojournalists, video reporters) were hit by threats and intimidation to silence them, to hinder their activity of providing information in the public interest. The data, updated as of December 17, is provided by the non-governmental Observatory Oxygen for Information. 24% of those threatened are women. Half of the intimidations (48%) were carried out with spurious complaints, a quarter (25%) with warnings, 16% with physical assaults, 10% with non-prosecutable initiatives that arbitrarily and in a discriminatory way obstructed access to information, 1% with damage.
During the year there was no lack of episodes related to the Covid-19 emergency. Out of a total of 301 cases, 69 concerned information operators committed to following the demonstrations against the introduction of the green pass or vaccine, or who documented the evolution of the pandemic. From 2006 to today Ossigeno has reported 4904 journalists under threat. The number of threatened people in 2021 is lower than in the previous two years: 301 compared to 495 in 2020 and 472 in 2019. "This significant decline does not reflect an improvement in the situation, which - in the opinion of the Observatory - remains dramatically serious and worrying and would require urgent attention and care that continues to be postponed indefinitely.The decline in 2021 essentially depends on the considerable weakening of the resources of the Oxygen Observatory that produces these data, carrying out a task of public interest that requires a considerable amount of work and which, according to the Recommendations of UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the 'OSCE and other organizations, should be carried out with adequate public resources and guarantees of autonomy from the Government and political forces, and instead it is carried out mainly with professional volunteering and some donations. "In 2021 Ossigeno received fewer donations and fewer voluntary services and consequently he was able to carry out a more limited search of the episodes that fall within his field of competence with reasonable certainty. Furthermore, Ossigeno recalls that "his Observatory,even when it operated with greater resources, it was able to measure and show in a documented way only the tip of the iceberg, not the whole phenomenon of threats aimed at journalists in Italy. The phenomenon is considerably greater: the submerged part, not visible, is much larger than that which can be seen ".
This year Ossigeno managed to conduct an in-depth examination and verification of the intimidations directed at 135 of the 301 journalists and bloggers surveyed.