I forbindelse med at italienerne den 13 april går til urnene for å velge sin 62. regjering siden krigen, setter Minerva i tiden fremover søkelys på italiensk politikk. Første artikkel ut er skrevet av Chris Hanretty og omhandler italienske mediers link til politikken.

 

In many countries, a residual sense of national pride means that many claims, which would be readily assented to in a conversation between co-nationals, become hotly contested when made by outsiders. In Italy, the reverse phenomenon seems to operate, and Italians will without hesitation talk up the problems of their country to outsiders, magnifying them beyond their proper proportion.

 

This phenomenon is particularly acute in the area of the media, where Italians are willing either to ignore or grossly under-estimate the problems that surround the media-politics nexus in other countries in a perverse and paradoxical bid to make Italy the country with the world’s best bad media. This bid enjoys a reasonable prospect of success. Whilst, in other countries, links between politics and the media usually involve obscure overlaps of share-holding and alliances of convenience between media owners and politicians (one thinks of the Hersant empire in France), a far simpler tale can be told about Italy. Usually the tale talks about a land in which everyone lived happily until the arrival of a man called Berlusconi, who came to power and ended press freedom (and everyone lived unhappily ever after).

 

This tale – like all good tales – necessarily involves simplification. There were laughably corrupt links between politics and the media before Berlusconi arrived on the scene, just as there will probably be somewhat corrupt and questionable links after he is gone. There was a deterioration in press freedom under previous Berlusconi governments, but at the same time it is simply not credible to claim that Berlusconi regularly contacted broadcasters to dictate tomorrow’s news.

 

I mentioned the Hersant group, a group built upon success in the print media, acquiring newspapers from publishers with other interests (Figaro was acquired from parfumier Francois Coty) and expanding them aggressively. What is notable about the Italian media is that ownership of newspapers, magazines or television channels has historically not been viewed as a way of making money but rather as a way of wielding political influence. The clearest example is Fiat’s ownership of Turin-based daily La Stampa (through Itedi). Given that potential cost-savings or synergies between newspaper publishing and automobile manufacturing seem implausible, one can only conclude – as many Italians did – that what Fiat thought was best for the country on Tuesday could be accurately gauged by what appeared in La Stampa’s editorials on Wednesday.

 

It was perhaps unsurprising that newspaper publishing were dominated by groups seeking influence, since the prospects for profit were bleak. Italians were late to the newspaper-reading party, and once they got there, they persisted in standing in the corner monopolising the drinks table. Thirty years ago, three times as many Norwegians as Italians read a newspaper on a per capita basis; the ratio today remains roughly the same. As Alessandro Mazzanti has noted (in a sadly neglected book on objectivity in Italian journalism, which bears the subtitle, “A Mistreated Ideal”), it was this original sin – that is to say, “the combination of structural backwardness and editorial independence on political objectives” – which created a vicious circle: for-profit editors didn’t want to enter the market because of the limited circulation, so political editors stepped in and created unreliable and unappealing content, which reduced the scope for profitable publishing, which led to continued support from political operatives – and a process that would repeat ad nauseaum.

 

Given the ease with which political interests penetrated the print media, it should not be surprising that broadcasting in Italy – and more particularly, the public service broadcaster Rai – has also been subjected to political pressures. It would be absurd to claim that no progress has been made over time; but unfortunately for Rai, progress has historically meant exchanging one restricted set of political masters for a slightly newer and less restricted set. Rai during the fifties was dominated by the Christian Democrats, with members of the Communist party – the main opposition party – almost never seen on screen. In order to appease junior members within their coalitions, the Christian Democrats gradually shared their control with other smaller parties until when, in the late seventies, the Christian Democrats needed the support of the Communists to govern the country (the period of the “great compromise”), this logic of extending control seemed a natural compensation for previous injustices.

 

Citing past abuses does not excuse current practice. This is especially true if Berlusconi’s own influence within Rai has been more pervasive and more persuasive than the influence wielded by politicians of the First Republic. The most celebrated example of Berlusconi’s influence was his 2002 speech from Sofia, in which he criticised “criminal use of public television, paid for with everyone’s money”, and cited two journalists and one comic (Enzo Biagi, Michele Santoro, and Daniele Luttazzi). Within a year of the speech, all three had left the broadcaster. Yet as wonderful as the tale is, and as commonly as it is cited in international reports on press freedom in Italy, the most exciting part of the tale lies in how this feat was accomplished. Like a murder story in which the victim is found in a locked room with no forced entry, there is no immediate chain of events which connects Berlusconi to the non-renewal of each star’s contract; rather, each had his contract reviewed at a different point, and was either not given a new contract, or given a new contract but on different (and unacceptable) conditions, and so on. It is indeed possible that Berlusconi did not ask for them to be fired, but that managers within the public broadcaster realised that they would make few enemies – and win many more powerful friends – if they were to rid Berlusconi of these troublesome journalists. I am unsure which of the two possibilities is more terrifying: that Berlusconi should directly intervene to have named individuals fired from the broadcaster, or that executives within the broadcaster should be so craven as to sacrifice the same individuals.

 

In news, I have argued elsewhere that there is surprisingly little evidence of a change in news coverage in the three public channels. Whilst all three channels gave more coverage to Mr. Berlusconi after his 2001 election victory in his capacity as prime minister, the ratio between the three public channels, and Mr. Berlusconi’s channels (which are, on the whole, biased in giving Mr. Berlusconi more coverage) remained the same both before and after a new, more Berlusconi-friendly board was appointed. If there was a push to favour the centre-right in Rai’s news coverage, it was more subtle than a simple change in the amount of screen-time given to each party.

 

In making these claims, I do not wish to suggest either that the situation is tolerable, nor that things are bad and that nothing better can be expected. The first would be perverse; the second would be to buy in too heavily to the idea of Italy as the country with the world’s best bad media. Better can be expected, but it can probably only come about through legislation. Existing legislation to deal with the political impact of the media consists of two laws: the legge Gasparri of 2004, which regulates antitrust in the field of the media, and which is hugely favourable to Mr. Berlusconi; and the par condicio, a law which establishes that competing electoral lists should receive equal air-time during electoral periods. Both are deficient, but in different respects.

 

The Gasparri law permitted Berlusconi to retain his current media holdings by a cunning sleight-of-hand: instead of being a dominant player in the television and advertising market, Mr. Berlusconi became a bit player in the much larger Integrated Communications System (SIC), a redefinition which has been compared to the claim that Coca-Cola is not a dominant player in the market for drinks, because if you look at all the water on the planet as a whole, Coca-Cola’s share is really very limited. The law is unlikely to survive legal challenges at a European level, and so another solution to the duopoly exercise by both Rai and Mr. Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels is clearly necessary. If, however, Berlusconi is re-elected, a stringent solution cannot be expected.

 

Given the limited impact of the Gasparri law, greater weight has consequently been placed on the shoulders of the par condicio, designed in part to ensure that no media owner could, in virtue of his or her possession of television channels, pump out unlimited amounts of electoral propaganda. A noble aim, to be sure, but the law oversteps the mark in requiring equality of screen-time between candidates in all arenas, including news. In theory, this requires journalists to devote as much screen-time to covering Sinistra Critica – a Marxist-Leninist group polling at around 0.2% – to covering Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition, currently polling around 40%.

 

Defenders of the par condicio claim – falsely – that such a rule exists “in all Western democracies” (claim made by Michele Lauria, member of the board of the sectoral regulator), which is a rather clumsy way of insinuating that without such a rule, Italy would once again be the country with the world’s best bad media. Of course, many countries bravely persist without such rules, because either politicians or the general public are reasonably sure that news coverage during an electoral campaign will be dictated by concerns about newsworthiness. After our short detour through Italian press history, however, we can see that such a faith in the discernment of journalists would be regarded at best as hopelessly naive, at worst as a form of electoral suicide for an unprepared party.

 

Absent a miraculous and overnight change in the quality of journalism in Italy and a great deal more than lip-service to the notion of objectivity, reduction in the instrumentalisation of the mass media will therefore only come with legislative measures that tackle properly the concentration of market power between Rai and Mediaset. Such a proposal is unlikely to emerge from this election. If, as the polls suggest, Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition is returned to office, it is unlikely to revisit the Gasparri law, which sets out the current rules both on anti-trust and on governance of Rai. If, as seems unlikely, the left is elected, then it will have to demonstrate that it has the tenacity to secure parliamentary passage for bills that will be depicted by Berlusconi as politically-minded attacks on the centre-left’s most dangerous opponent. Any bill would have to recognise that some good does come from public broadcasting in Italy: after all, can a country which broadcasts Roberto Benigni discussing Dante in prime-time (available on RaiUno) really be described as the country with the world’s best bad media?