Italy: Berlusconi Cracks Down On The Freedom of The Press

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is also a media mogul in control of about 3/4 of Italian media, he owns TV stations, newspapers, magazines, and also a major soccer team. Berlusconi has the tools to control the message, and he has been exercising that power during all of his political career. The only possible comparison would be if Rupert Murdoch was Prime Minister of Australia.

A few months ago, Berlusconi was entangled in a sex scandal involving high class call girls visiting one of his villas to entertain Berlusconi and some of his powerful friends including a former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. The sex scandal was not revealed by the Italian media, but by the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Beside the sex scandal, Berlusconi has faced,  numerous time in his career, credible allegations of ties with the Mafia. Under the Berlusconi administration it has become increasingly difficult and some time dangerous to report the news in Italy.

According to press freedom advocates, journalists in Italy are now only “partly free” to report the news. In recent weeks, a petition protesting government control of the media has garnered close to 500,000 signatures. This weekend a demonstration in support of the petition took place in Rome.

The petition was put together by La Repubblica after the Berlusconi administration filed a libel against the publication. It follows a long list of orchestrated attacks against the independent daily which can only be seen as an attempt to silence the free press.

The questions addressed to Italy’s PM are real questions that have prompted people’s interest not only in Italy, but also in the media across the world. The response of Berlusconi has been to intimidate those who exercise the right and duty of “seeking, receiving and reporting information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” as stated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved when memory was still very much alive of the way information degenerated into propaganda under the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis in Germany.

The data in the freedom of the press 2009 global press freedom rankings is alarming to say the least. Italy is the only country in Western Europe to be rated ” partly free”, as far as freedom of the press. Among the 195 countries in the survey, only 36 percent ( 70 countries) are considered to have a free press, 31 percent (61 countries including Italy & Israel) a partly free press, and 33 percent (64 countries) not a free press at all.

To view the global press freedom rankings click here.