AlterNet: Has Berlusconi Created Titillating TV 'Fascism' in Italy?

[marmar]

Has Berlusconi Created Titillating TV 'Fascism' in Italy?

By Nina Burleigh, AlterNet. Posted October 6, 2009.

An interview with Erik Gandini, director of the documentary Videocracy, an account of how Berlusconi's sex-obsessed media empire has shaped the country over the past 30 years.



Watch: http://www.alternet.org/world/143093/has_berlusconi_created_titillating_tv_%27fascism%27_in_italy__


Waving banners scrawled with “Berlusconi is bad for Italy’s health,” more than a hundred thousand people rallied to protest for a free press in Italy over the weekend. Not surprisingly, Italy’s newspapers and television barely covered the event in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo.

The Italian Press Federation organized the gathering after nearly two decades of growing interference in free journalism within and around the media empire owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The protest capped a summer in which Berlusconi’s wife dumped him for allegedly having an underage girlfriend, pornographic video and pictures surfaced from his Sardinian party house. Last week, journalists on one of the government-owned broadcasting channels RAI 2, interviewed a woman, Patrizia d’Addario, who claimed she took money to have sex with the Italian leader. The government promptly withdrew the journalists’ contracts, even though D’Addario’s tell-all book about her romp with the septuagenarian has been covered widely in Europe.

While half of Italy apparently still supports the randy PM, the firings are only the latest in a long history of incursions against press freedom by the Berlusconi government. Italy’s journalists are not in fear for their lives as are reporters in Zimbabwe or Russia, but they are in fear for their jobs. Many leading broadcasters and writers have been fired or quietly relieved of work over the years for criticizing the Prime Minister. They, and their commentary, have been replaced by young women whose rise in broadcasting is related to their ability to perform the “stachetto” – a kind of partially clothed pole-dance without the pole that is the chief entrance test for women who want to join Berlusconi’s television empire. Only a few journalists remain with the access and courage to question, or even cover, scandalous personal and official behavior by the PM that would, in the United States and most other European countries, have provoked drastic regime change. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/world/143093/has_berlusconi_created_titillating_tv_%27fascism%27_in_italy__

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. I heard an interview with this guy on NPR

It was really fascinating. The Italian media sounded as bad and possibly even worse than ours (something I would not have believed to be possible)!

Anyway, I guess Berlusconi has a real stranglehold on almost the entire media. This guy couldn't get an ad for his movie on any major network! Some Italian woman they interviewed said that the Italians were becoming a banal and stupid people because of their television. She also said only 20% of the population read newspapers.

So I guess we are not alone in the dumbing down of nations.

[marmar]

2. Murdoch and Berlusconi are WMDs

nt

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

3. To call these 2 scum. Would be insulting to scum. nt

[LeftishBrit]

4. Too true!