Word: italian
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...discussion of what's wrong with Italian politics eventually leads to the question of what's wrong with the country's media. In a nation where the Prime Minister controls the airwaves, only one out of 10 people buys a daily paper, compared with one in five Americans and three in five people in Japan, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Italians, it seems, don't care to read the news...
...what if the fault doesn't lie with Italians' appetite for news? What if the problem is with what's on the menu? At a literary festival in central Sardinia last month, I had a chance to feel the public's dissatisfaction with what was on offer. During a panel on the media, when I observed that Italian journalists seem to write mostly for each other, for politicians, or for the pleasure of reading their own prose, the audience clapped its approval. For much of the following hour, questioners demanded to know why the news wasn't being written...
They deserve an answer. Not much has changed in the 50 years since the political journalist Enzo Forcella declared that the Italian newspaper was written for just 1,500 readers: ministers, parliamentarians, party leaders, union bosses and industrialists. News is reported, he wrote, in an "atmosphere of family discussion, with protagonists who have known each other since childhood, exchanging jokes, speaking a language of allusions...
Meanwhile, Berlusconi's repeated claims that he is Italy's' victim No. 1 of the media strike many as absurd, or downright Orwellian. His ownership of and influence over some 90 % of Italian television is again on bright display, as commercials have been banned on all major TV stations of a new Swedish movie that criticizes Berlusconi's media control...
...paradox, of course, is that that his filing lawsuits over the scandals sets off another round of ribald accounts of Berlusconi's private life. The latest suit was filed Wednesday against another left-leaning Italian daily, L'Unita, which had referred to a comedienne's sketch about Berlusconi allegedly taking medical injections that allow him to have sex. The Prime Minister's attorney, Niccolo Ghedini, explained to the daily Corriere della Sera on Friday that if necessary Berlusconi would testify in the libel case to prove that he is not impotent: "And why shouldn't Berlusconi be allowed to explain...