Silvio Berlusconi enjoyed a comprehensive victory in the Italian elections held on April 14 and 15, as Italians voted en masse for his Partito della Libertà or Popolo della Libertà – they don’t seem to be able to make their minds up over which name to use – made up of Berlusconi’s own baby Forza Italia, the ex-neofascists of Alleanza Nazionale and the anti-immigrant party the Lega Nord.
The success of the Lega Nord was the real surprise of the Italian elections winning 8.3% of the national vote to become the country’s third biggest party. The Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania is a relatively young political party – it was founded in 1989. Its raison d’être is to secure fiscal independence from Rome and ultimately the secession of the northern regions of Italy from the rest of the country.
The Lega’s unprecedented electoral success can be largely attributed to its anti-immigrant stance. Up until twenty years ago Italy was a country whose contemporary history was punctuated by emigration rather than immigration. However, today Italy has an ever increasing immigrant population of approximately 4.9 million.
The Italian media cultivates a culture of fear and the majority of crimes reported are those carried out by or attributed to members of the growing immigrant community. Two years ago it was Albanians who were the primary targets of media scapegoating but since the signing of the Schengen accords they have scaled the immigration ladder with attention firmly focused on the rapidly growing Romanian community.
The Lega’s election campaign was characterized by base anti-immigrant rhetoric, e.g. one poster depicted a Native American chief with the slogan: ‘He let immigrants in, and now he lives on a reserve.’ While the Lega has long claimed that it isn’t a racist party its leader, Umberto Bossi, has called Africans ‘Bingo-bongos’ and suggested firing on boats carrying illegal immigrants to Italy while a Lega councillor called for separate train carriages for foreigners.
Rolling headlines leading up to the election such as ‘ROME: SECURITY ALERT’, only helped to increase the level of tension in a country that is suffering not only its worst economic crisis in fifty years but also a general malaise at the state it’s in. And while there have been a number of high profile rape cases perpetrated by Romanian nationals in the last year, according to the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, 69.7% of rape cases in Italy are carried out by the victim’s partner while 17.4% of rapists are someone the victim already knew. But the Italian media primarily seems concerned with the foreign nationals who form part of the 6.2% of rapists who didn’t know their victim.
The Lega’s tactics worked a treat as the election results testify. Ironically Italy has the second lowest birth rate in the Western World (1.23 children per woman) and if this trend continues the steadily growing influx of foreign workers (primarily Romanians and Albanians) will become the backbone not only of the Italian economy but of the Italian community. Already migrant workers provide cheap manual labour especially in the building industry and as home care workers providing support to the elderly. Often illegal and exploited, migrant workers provide the work force for many of the small businesses which make the Lega Nord’s strongholds of Veneto and Lombardia so wealthy.
Following the elections I was really pissed off. It’s difficult for me to understand how the Lega Nord is an acceptable part of political life for many Italians. Although I have an EU passport and can’t claim to understand what it’s like to be what is referred to here as extracomunitaro - this is the name that Italians give to anyone from outside the EU, well anyone who is not white, rich and English speaking like the Americans, Australians etc. – but as a foreigner living in Italy the victory of the Lega and its potential bargaining power in the new Italian government was weighing heavily on my soul. So I did what any normal citizen would do and searched out some solace in the chewing gum for the brain that is Facebook.
Having previously vented my spleen about having to write the ‘What are doing right now’ bit in Facebook in the third person, I decided to put this function to good use by adding ‘Pat wishes that the Lega Nord would go and fuck themselves’ before logging out. A succinct and to the point summation of my feelings at the time.
Coming back from a lunch spent failing miserably trying to cheer up my Italian workmates who were all deeply depressed following Berlusconi’s election victory, the numb anger that has sporadically filled my veins since I was a child whenever I feel accosted by injustice began pumping through me. Again I succumbed to drowning my sorrows in the leech on life otherwise known as Facebook.
To my surprise, when I logged there were adverts at the bottom of the page for the Lega Nord’s Facebook group. Curiosity got the better of me and after resisting the temptation to join the group and tell them to andare a quell paese, I decided to have a look around. Unsurprisingly the group was littered with goodwill messages and the occasional racist remark from the Lega’s Web 2.0 population. A large number of these young Padanians (hardcore Lega supporters don’t see themselves as Italian but as padani ) had left their beloved homeland to search their fortune elsewhere. Sadly studying and living overseas didn’t seem to have helped open their minds to the fact that the history of mankind has always been based on patterns of migration.
From the Lega Nord’s Facebook group I followed a link to the official website of the giovani padani or young padanians. The first thing that struck me as odd was the picture of Mel Gibson in Braveheart in the top corner. What the hell does William Wallace have to do with northern Italy I thought to myself? I tried a logical appraoch: I remembered that the Lega Nord claims that northern Italians are not a Latin but a Celtic people, with Senator Roberto Calderoli even getting married in a pagan ceremony. But what really struck me was finding that the giovani padani have taken two of my fellow Irishmen to their bosom: Michael Collins and Bobby Sands.
No matter what anyone’s personal view of these two figures may be either historically or politically, what the hell have they got to do with the Lega Nord I asked myself. An attempt to create links between two so-called ‘Celtic’ peoples? Nostalgia for that trip they made to Ireland with school when they were fifteen? A soft spot for a pint of the black stuff?
My brain was bombarding me with too many ideas at once creating a cerebral experience akin to the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gathering my thoughts I decided that I couldn’t give a fuck if the Lega wanted to hijack the complete annals of Irish history for their own aims, they wouldn’t be the first, or even if they all claim Irish passports. The only thing that was clear to me was that the everything the Lega stands for was anathema to me.
This is an essay that I wrote in 2004 which looks at Silvio Berlusconi’s influence on the Italian media. This essay was thankfully made obsolete following Romano Prodi’s election victory in 2006, but Italians go to the polls today to elect a new government and it looks as if Berluska is going to win.
Silvio Berlusconi is ranked twenty-fifth on the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people. His economic empire is based primarily on the media industry. The Berlusconi controlled Finnivest group has a forty-eight percent share in the television group Mediaset which controls three terrestrial stations that enjoy forty-five percent of viewing figures in Italy.
Finnivest also enjoys a forty-eight percent share in the Mondadori publishing group. Mondadori accounts for thirty-one percent of the Italian publication industry and forty-five of magazine publications while Finnivest’s marketing group, Publitalia, accounts for sixty percent of all advertising in Italy. In addition, the Berlusconi family own the daily newspapers Il Giornale, which has a readership of 230,000, and Il Foglio, which has 10,000 readers daily. Moreover, through shares in Mondadori, Finnivest controls the most popular Italian weekly magazine Panorama.
Berlusconi is also the prime minister of Italy. Consequently, he has indirect influence over RAI, the state run broadcaster. While large sections of the national news media are controlled by media corporations in Europe such as Bertelsmann and Kirch in Germany and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Britain “Berlusconi’s combination of media power and political power is unique in Europe.” Consequently, the conflict of interests between Berlusconi’s political and business interests has been widely criticised and is perceived as a threat to the pluralism of Italian journalism.
Italy is ranked in fifty-third place out of 139 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ report on press freedom worldwide. This is as a direct result of Berlusconi’s conflict political and media interests. In addition, the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly ‘Report on the freedom of expression in Europe’, 14 January 2003, stated that “the potential conflict of interest between holding of political office by Mr Berlusconiand his private economic and media interests is a threat to media pluralism.” However, both groups acknowledge that the print media in Italy offers a wide range of views which reflect the broad spectrum of political opinions in Italy.
The party press in Italy, i.e. the newspapers of political parties, are a distinctive feature of the Italian press, e.g. the Neo-Fascist paper Il Secolo d’Italia, the communist paper il Manifesto, and l’Unità financed by the Democratici di sinistra. While the importance of the party press in Italy has decreased significantly in the post ‘Velvet Revolution’ world its continued existence ensures a broad range of political opinions are represented in the Italian press. However, the influence of the party press is limited primarily to the adherents of the specific political viewpoints each paper represents. Conversely, it is the commercial press in Italy which has the greatest impact on influencing broader political opinion in Italy
The primary commercial newspapers in Italy are Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. Il Corriere della Sera has a daily circulation of 700,000 making it Italy’s most popular daily newspaper. It is owned by the Rizzoli Corriere della Sera group and is regarded as a centrist newspaper. Notably, the newspaper was critical of the Berlusconi government in the lead up to the Iraq war and with regard to Berlusconi’s conflict of media and political interests. La Repubblicais owned by Carlo de Bendetti and is Italy’s second largest daily newspaper with a circulation of 650,000 copies. Analogous to the de Bendetti group’s weekly magazine L’Espresso, La Repubblica is a centre-left publication. Thus, it is clear that the Italian press offers a broad range of political viewpoints.
However, Silvio Berlusconi’s influence on the Italian press has increased in recent times. Finnivest’s thirty-one percent share in the Mondadori group was utilised for political purposes prior to the Italian general election of 2001. Each household in Italy received a copy of a book Una Storia Italiana, a piece of political propaganda promoting Berlusconi and Forza Italia. In addition, Indro Montanelli, founding editor of the Berlusconi owned daily Il Giornale, was fired in 1994 for his refusal to endorse Forza Italia. Lumley notes that “through newspapers generations of entrepreneurs have sought to exercise their influence” and that “the majority of influential newspapers [in Italy] were, and are, controlled by companies, not by parties or government.” However, while Berlusconi is an entrepreneur he is concurrently the head of a political party and of government.
The adoption of the Berlusconi government’s draft law on telecommunications, i.e. the so-called ‘Gasparri’ law, by the Italian Senate on 29 April 2004 represents a significant threat to the pluralism of the Italian print media. Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi refused to sign the bill in 2003 considering it a potential threat to media pluralism. The law allows for media companies to have shares in more than one news media group. Theoretically, print media groups, which were previously banned from owning television networks, can from January 2009 onwards but into the television industry. However, the financial reality is that only Finnivest-Mediaset is currently in a position to take advantage of this law, thus potentially increasing Berlusconi’s control of the Italian print media.
As previously noted according to Reporters Without Frontiers and the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly pluralism in the Italian media is upheld. However, the author Alexander Stille claims that Berlusconi has been able to exercise increased indirect control over Il Corriere della Sera since his entrance into politics in. Stille claims that Il Corriere della Sera’s editorial position has moved noticeably to the right since the formation of Forza Italia in 1994. In addition, Stille maintains that Berlusconi has dedicated his attention primarily to influencing the section of the print media which has a “broad mainstream centrist readership,” e.g. Il Corriere della Sera, because it is a source of potential voters for Forza Italia.
Notably, it is the commercial press in Italy which has the greatest impact on influencing wider political opinion in Italy. Lumley notes that “particularly in times of sudden change when readers are looking for guidance and when political figures are seeking to construct new alliances and to win support, these newspapers [the commercial press] have played a notable political role.”
In the autumn of 2002 Il Corriere della Serafeatured articles on Berlusconi’s conflict of interests and the prosecution of Berlusconi and Forza Italiasenator Cesare Previti for bribing a judge in the acquisition of the SME food group. Il Corriere della Sera’s editor at the time, Ferruccio De Bortoli, came under increased pressure from Berlusconi’s under secretary and spokesman, Paolo Bonaiuti, to allow Previti the right to reply. Concurrently, Salvatore Ligresti, a Sicilian financier and business associate of Berlusconi, tried unsuccessfully to become a shareholder in the HdP group which controls Il Corriere della Sera. This action was viewed by the staff of the newspaper as an attempt by Berlusconi to “progressively take control of the newspaper.”
In addition, Il Corriere della Serais part owned by the Agnelli family whose Fiat group was undergoing financial difficulty during this period. Stille notes that concurrently Fiat had increased its advertising on Mediaset networks while reducing publicity on RAI. Thus, Stille claims that “keeping the good graces of the prime minister” was fundamental to Fiat’s business and increased the pressure on De Bortoli to resign as editor of Il Corriere della Sera
Although Stille’s claims may be viewed as apocryphal the dismissal of two of Italy’s leading journalists from RAI 1 in 2002 illustrates Berlusconi’s influence in the broadcast media and his potential influence over the print media. Berlusconi’s public criticism of two of RAI 1’s leading journalists Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro led to the cancellation in 2002 of their news programmes Il Fatto and Sciuscià respectively.
Santoro openly criticised Berlusconi and his government, while Biagi, the elder statesman of Italian journalism, had invited the actor-director Roberto Benigni onto his programme on the eve of the general election of 2001. Benigni proceeded to lampoon Berlusconi. The dismissal of Biagi and Santoro, whose programmes were amongst two of the most popular news and current affairs programmes on Italian television, illustrates the potential influence Berlusconi could have on the print media in Italy.
Moreover, the print media in Italy suffers economically from the dominant position of the broadcast media in Italy. Reporters Without Frontiers maintain that television’s dominance in Italy could ultimately pose a threat to the print media’s independence. In addition, television is the primary source of news for Italians who watch on average 240 minutes of television each day. Furthermore, fifty-seven percent of all advertising in Italy is on television as opposed to thirty-five percent in the UK and twenty-three percent in Germany.
This is to the detriment of the finances of the Italian print media. Consequently, the agenda of the press in Italy has become increasingly influenced by television. Papuzzi states that “anything in the telegiornale has to be covered in the morning edition.” It is too far fetched to claim that Berlusconi is responsible for the increased influence of the television industry on newspaper content. However, Publitalia’s sixty percent control of advertising in Italy and the increase in television advertising over newspaper advertising can be linked indirectly to Berlusconi’s influence.
While the Italian print media industry enjoys a healthy pluralism in contrast to the broadcast media this pluralism is under increasing threat. The De Bortoli incident demonstrates that the strapotente position which Berlusconi exercises over the Italian television and advertising industries can be potentially extended to increase his influence on the pluralistic Italian press. In addition, the passing of the ‘Gasparri’ law further threatens the pluralism of the Italian press and has opened up the possibility of Berlusconi extending his media empire to control the section of the Italian print media which is the most influential with moderate voters in times of political uncertainty, i.e. the commercial press.
Bibliography
Baranski, Zygmunt G. and Lumley, Robert (eds.). Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1990
Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. ‘Monopolisation of the electronic media and possible abuse of power in Italy’, http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/doc04/EDOC10195.htm#_ftnref12
(document downloaded on 30/03/05)
The Economist. ‘The SME affair’, http://www.berluscastop.it/__artic/econ_en1.htm, (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Forbes List of the World’s Richest People, http://www.forbes.com, (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Forgacs , David and Lumley, Robert (eds.). Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996
Glossarietto della politica e dell’economia italiana. http://www.ucc.ie/italian/resources/glossarietto.html (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Jones, Tobias. The Dark Heart of Italy. London : Faber, 2003
Ketupa.net Media Profiles. ‘Berlusconi’, http://www.ketupa.net/berlusconi.htm (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Lumley, Robert. ‘Peculiarities of the Italian newspaper’, in Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, Pp. 199-215
Reporters Without Borders. ‘A media conflict of interest: anomaly in Italy’, http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=6393 (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Reporters Without Borders. ‘Gasparri law finally adopted’, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=8695 (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Wide Angle. ‘Interview: Alexander Stille’, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/berlusconi/transcript3.html (document downloaded on 30/03/05)
Filed under: Italy
Shafts of sunlight pierce the fluorescent yellow glow of the carriage as the train rattles towards the next station. Taking the Metro B from Termini towards EUR you travel through two thousand years of history, passing under the Coliseum and the Circus Maximus as the train weaves its way southwards.
They started building the EUR district in 1938. It was supposed to hold the World Fair of 1942 which would have celebrated twenty years of Fascist rule but WW2 got in the way. It’s full of colossal marble and limestone buildings that combine classicism, rationalism and fascist propaganda. Passers by are dwarfed by these austere leftovers of Italy’s fascist past.
The Italian director Federico Fellini described EUR as perfect for anyone who creates images for a living, and it has provided the backdrop to numerous films from Fellini’s Boccaccio 70 to one of cinema’s biggest flops Hudson Hawk. But it’s another film made at EUR which comes into my head as I make my way to work: the 1968 Spaghetti Horror classic The Last Man on Earth.
Starring one of Horror’s legendary names, Vincent Price, The Last Man on Earth tells the story of a world in which a mystery disease has transformed the human race into vampire-like creatures. Only Price’s character is immune. Every day he follows the same routine: driving around EUR vampire hunting and disposing of infected bodies. The film explores the loneliness of Price’s character, Dr. Robert Morgan. Price’s vain attempts to make contact with other possible plague survivors end in disappointment as it becomes ever clearer that he is the last of his kind.
The film is punctuated by the monotony of Dr. Morgan’s daily life which is framed by the austere and monumental architecture of Eur. He locks himself into his house to escape the vampire hordes outside; his only moment of pleasure comes from listening to Jazz records on his gramophone.
Back on the Metro B, the commuters huddle, fidget and battle for space in the overcrowded carriage. The tedium of the journey is broken up by moments of politeness and discourtesy as some passengers battle with their conscience and offer their seats to older travellers while others display their menefreghismo, or ‘I don’t give a damnism’, lounging comfortably while reading one of the numerous free daily newspapers which litter Rome’s streets.
Getting off the train at EUR Palasport, I can already hear the hustle and bustle of the market stalls above. Walking up the damp and newspaper sodden stairs I squint my eyes to adjust to the natural light. The January sun warms my face; the brightness of the never-ending Roman sky stretches out above me as I make my way towards the office. There is something about this place that bombards my mind with memories forcing me to reflect on the past. Moments of fear, pleasure, and shame come flooding back simultaneously.
Watching the other commuters busily make their way to work, it strikes me that our lives are similar to Price’s character in the Last Man on Earth. The humdrum of our daily existence is marked by a loneliness which we struggle to overcome. Our moments of pleasure come from the MP3 players which ease the uncomfortable silence. We too vainly attempt to make contact with the outside world through conversation, only to be left disappointed by monosyllabic replies, stony silence or ignorance.
It seems that modern life has closed off many of the normal channels of human contact. We rush back home at night to lock ourselves into our houses and apartments, shutting out all others in our own B Movie Horror. Sometimes it really feels like we’re all Dr. Robert Morgan: we’re all the Last Man on Earth.
