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“Today, we must talk about politics,” Silvio Berlusconi, the owner of the Fininvest media empire, said at the beginning of a meeting in which he had assembled his top editors and producers on September 25, 1993. “And the first thing . . . is we must behave like a team. Every editor or director, with his autonomy, must play the same music. We must avoid disagreements amongst ourselves, one newscast against the other, one network against the other . . . . We must sing in chorus on the themes that interest us . . . . You must understand, you top editors, that we must respond to those firing against us with a concentrated attack of all our means against them. If those who attack us unjustly . . . were assaulted simultaneously by all the various media of our group, the aggression would end there.”
This “militarization” of the Berlusconi media prepared the ground for his political career, which he would announce a few months later in the form of a videocassette sent simultaneously to all the major networks, half of which he already owned. In it, he addressed the nation as if he were already prime minister, and two months later he actually was. Thus began a new era and the founding of a new model of politics in Italy, and perhaps elsewhere; a new type of political regime in which normal democratic competition between political parties is grossly distorted by a highly unequal access to television. Berlusconi combined the forces of media, money, and celebrity and translated them into political power, a model imitated soon after by Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s fourth richest man and largest private media owner, who also became his country’s prime minister. It is a model that both borrows from the campaigns of American figures such as Ross Perot while anticipating the celebrity candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the highly partisan use of broadcast media that we have seen in this country by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and Clear Channel.
Once in office, Berlusconi dedicated an extraordinary amount of his energy to gaining control of Rai, the state broadcasting system and his chief competitor. Broadcasters specifically denounced by Berlusconi were fired, satirists who made fun of him were taken off the air, and trusted associates and former employees were placed in positions of power so that the three state channels (or at least two of them) sang in chorus most of the time along with the Berlusconi channels. With both Rai and Berlusconi’s empire (now called Mediaset), his control of Italian broadcasting was near total.
Once Berlusconi came to power, journalists on state television were required to adhere strictly to a news formula known as “the sandwich,” in which virtually every political story began by stating the government’s (or Berlusconi’s) point of view, followed by a sound bite or two from the opposition and concluded with a rebuttal from the government. Berlusconi himself occupied an incredible 50 percent of airtime on the state-owned newscasts, while the opposition accounted for barely 20 percent.
When Berlusconi addressed a nearly empty hall at the United Nations, Italian state TV cut and pasted into the scene the audience for the speech of Secretary General Kofi Annan, to create the impression for Italian viewers that their leader had been enthusiastically applauded by a full audience. When the Italian economy struggled through three straight years of recession and near-zero growth, Rai showed a world of happy prosperity. “We talk a lot about consumption and free time and little about the country’s problems — a patina of carefree life which has little relationship to what is actually going on in the country,” journalists from Rai 1 wrote in January 2004 in a letter of protest over the way the network was being run.
In April of this year, despite strict political control of both his own TV stations and the three state-owned channels, Berlusconi lost his position as prime minister — albeit by a razor-thin margin. His coalition lost again in local administrative elections and in a national referendum that his media had aggressively pushed. Nearly thirteen years after entering politics, Berlusconi may be in the twilight of his political career.
So is Berlusconi a purely transient Italian phenomenon — the product of Italian society under very particular circumstances — or did he really introduce a new model of media-based celebrity politics that has changed the political game in Italy and elsewhere?
The answer, I think, is both.
Clearly, there were a series of anomalous and very Italian aspects to Berlusconi’s rise to power. He was allowed to create a virtual monopoly of private television in Italy — his three networks together with the three state channels account for about 90 percent of both audience share and ad revenue — thanks to the unwavering support of Italy’s leading governing parties. (In the 1980s, the Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi abandoned a state visit to Britain to sign a special decree to keep Berlusconi’s TV networks on the air after judges found them to be operating in violation of Italian law. Unsurprisingly, prosecutors later found evidence of an $18 million payment from one of Berlusconi’s company’s offshore bank accounts to one belonging to Craxi.)
Berlusconi was part of an old, corrupt system that was and is, alas, extremely widespread, even if he was one of its biggest players and perhaps the person who benefited the most from it. It helped catapult him from a local Milan real-estate developer to the country’s richest man by the mid-1990s, the owner, along with his TV monopoly, of the largest book publisher, the largest magazine publisher, financial companies, the biggest movie studio and theater chain, Internet providers, and sports franchises.
But Berlusconi’s shadow extends beyond the shores of Italy. If there were old-fashioned political reasons for Berlusconi’s sudden success, his methods borrowed from a decidedly modern formula that has become familiar to American observers.
As Berlusconi tried to decide whether to enter politics, he obsessively conducted poll after poll during the summer and fall of 1993. In one of those polls, Berlusconi discovered that he enjoyed 97 percent name recognition with Italian voters, while the actual prime minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was known to only half the electorate. Another poll showed that Berlusconi was the most beloved figure in a sampling of Italian school children, followed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesus Christ in that order.
What that poll suggested was that there had been an inversion of values in Italy and that figures from the world of entertainment, television, and movies had overtaken the traditional figures of political and religious authority in popularity. That two of the people most beloved by Italian young people, Berlusconi and Schwarzenegger, have succeeded with shocking ease in translating their universal name recognition and popularity into political power — without prior political experience — is an element of novelty worth noting.
“What Berlusconi understood better than anyone else,” says Renato Mannheimer, a sociologist at the University of Milan and a prominent Italian pollster, “is that the old politics based on class interests and ideology — communism, Catholicism, labor, capital — had disappeared.” For several decades, Italian voters, like voters in many countries, voted by class or social group. If you were an industrial worker, you voted, almost automatically, for the Italian Communist Party. If you were a rural farm worker, you voted for the Christian Democratic Party, and so on. With the end of the cold war and the economic fragmentation of a post-industrial economy, those loyalties broke down and suddenly tens of millions of votes were up for grabs.
Italy’s once ideological electorate had now become heavily disillusioned with politics, and was ripe for the politics of anti-politics. In crafting a message for this post-ideological public, Berlusconi looked to a series of American models, as he had in the other dimensions of his career — real estate, advertising, shopping malls, and television. He projected some of the contagious optimism of Ronald Reagan, the first celebrity presidential candidate from the world of Hollywood, and studied closely the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot, an important precursor of the billionaire businessman in politics, who played on the widespread dissatisfaction with traditional politics by offering to substitute can-do pragmatism for the corrupt ways of the professional politician.
It was also new and important that Berlusconi took much of the look and feel of his new political movement from the world of entertainment. Along with conducting his campaign appearances by moving freely across the stage, microphone in hand, like a lounge singer (which he had been in his youth) or a talk-show host, he used the rhetoric and symbolism of soccer in creating a political party ex novo. He called the party Forza Italia (Go, Italy!), the chant that Italian soccer fans use to cheer on the national team, and referred to party members as gli azzurri (the blues), as are the members of the Italian team. As the president of A.C. Milan, which he guided to numerous national and international championships, he came to understand that the popularity of the team had produced political capital. He was struck by the adulation of soccer fans who would routinely ignore his politician friends in order to get his autograph. He has recounted that a few years before entering politics, one fan shouted as he drove by: “Silvio, if you want, we’ll vote for whatever party you tell us. We’ll give eight million votes to the party you want. To be able to give them to you personally would be the best!”
Berlusconi’s status as a soccer mogul gave him a working-class appeal that helped voters ignore the possible impact of his conservative economic agenda. In a debate with Luigi Spaventa, a professional economist who was Berlusconi’s opponent for a parliamentary seat in Rome in 1994, rather than answer questions about his economic program, Berlusconi simply cut short the discussion by saying, “How many Intercontinental Cups have you won? Before trying to compete with me, try, at least, winning a couple of national championships!” The remark had the air of unassailable truth, however irrelevant it might be to Berlusconi’s fitness to govern. Thus, while Spaventa and others on the left took pains to explain how Berlusconi’s program would damage ordinary working people, Berlusconi, the billionaire, shrewdly managed to make an opponent like Spaventa seem an effete university professor and himself a “doer” and “winner,” a person whom the average working man and soccer fan could relate to and admire.
In fact, when Berlusconi won in 1994 and then again in 2001, close analysis of the votes revealed that in both races the Italian electorate had undergone a seismic shift. Berlusconi had succeeded in winning over a significant number of working-class voters as well as many younger voters who had traditionally supported the left. Social scientists found to their surprise that the strongest predictors of a voter’s orientation were no longer class or church affiliation but what television stations a person watched and for how long. People who watched the Mediaset channels were much more inclined to vote for Berlusconi; those who watched the state-owned network Rai were more likely to vote for some other party. The more hours a day people watched television, the more likely they were to vote for Berlusconi. “In other words, the world of show business and television distinguishes the electorate more than the divisions of class,” Roberto Cartocci, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, wrote after the 2001 elections. “Put another way, the two coalitions are separated not so much by the traditional division of labor and capital but rather by the competition between Rai and Mediaset.”
The siren song of the billionaire candidate was particularly persuasive among voters who had only a grade-school education and those who said they had not read a book in the past year. More than 65 percent of those with only a fifth-grade education voted for Berlusconi, while his support dropped to 35.9 percent among Christian Democratic voters with a high school or college education. Those unskilled and generally poorer segments of Italian society were unlikely to be beneficiaries of the “liberal revolution” that Berlusconi, modeling himself on Reagan and Thatcher, was promising. But those voters acknowledged having little interest in politics, and had formed an extremely positive image of Berlusconi from watching the popular soap operas and Hollywood films on his channels.
This pattern, too, echoes in America, where white men with only a high school education voted for George Bush over John Kerry by a 23 percent margin in 2004, even though that group has seen its economic position slip significantly in the past twenty-five years, an era dominated by Reagan and the Bushes. Many voters identified personally with Bush — found him to be likable, straight-talking, religious, and sincere — even though they suspected he was out of touch with people in their economic situation.
In office, Berlusconi concentrated his energies to an extraordinary degree on two problems: controlling information and muzzling the Italian judiciary, which threatened to send him and his closest associates to jail.
To get elected and keep his political career afloat for more than twelve years — a period in which Berlusconi and many of his associates would be tried and in some cases convicted of extremely serious crimes, ranging from bribing sitting judges to collusion with the mafia — Berlusconi needed to radically change public opinion, which had been extremely supportive of the corruption investigation before he entered politics. Through relentless daily attacks, the Berlusconi media went hammer and tong at the magistrates who investigated Berlusconi and his friends.
When he entered politics, Berlusconi invented a loud, highly partisan, bullying style of television news that in many ways anticipated Fox News and others. Berlusconi and a series of super-aggressive newscasters he had hired introduced an unprecedented degree of verbal violence and polarization into Italian broadcast media. For years, Berlusconi’s chief channel, Canale 5, aired a twenty-minute program every day that was hosted by Vittorio Sgarbi, a member of parliament with the conservative coalition, and dedicated almost entirely to attacking the prosecutors who dared investigate Berlusconi and his associates. Referring to the pool of anti-corruption magistrates in Milan, Sgarbi said at one point, “The prosecutors of Operation Clean Hands should be arrested; they are a band of criminals with a license to kill, aiming at the subversion of our democratic order.” Berlusconi’s family newspaper, Il Giornale, referred to the chief prosecutor of Palermo, who successfully tried Berlusconi’s close friend and campaign manager for collusion with the mafia, as a death-squad leader.
While using his own media to attack his enemies, Berlusconi co-opted many of the media outlets he didn’t own by finding ways to give their journalists money. For example, Bruno Vespa, the host of Rai’s most important evening talk show, writes a column for Berlusconi’s weekly newsmagazine Panorama. Francesco Pionati, the journalist who covered Berlusconi for the main state channel, also has a weekly column in Panorama. Thus, the two journalists who are most heard on the government broadcasting system received what amounts to a second salary from the politician they cover most frequently. Several important political columnists for the two main centrist newspapers, La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera, have also received money from Berlusconi as columnists or consultants.
Another disturbing characteristic of the Berlusconi phenomenon was how he combined his control of hundreds of seats in parliament and thousands of key positions in the state bureaucracy by using his vast media power to manufacture pseudo-scandals at will. Thus, for example, a blistering exposé of supposed judicial wrongdoing would prompt Berlusconi’s allies in parliament to call for an inquiry or disciplinary proceedings against the judges. The Berlusconi media would then cover these events, quoting members of parliament or the government, which, in turn, would give an appearance of substance and reality to their initial charges, which would lead to a new round of media stories and a new round of reaction from the political world. The charges, almost invariably, would prove after a few weeks or months or years to have no substance — a fact that would go unnoticed in the Berlusconi press (and often in other press as well) — but the country would already have moved on to a new series of equally unfounded charges.
Thus the former prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro, once the hero of the Milan anti-corruption investigation, became the object of a brutal press campaign, accusing him of taking bribes. The charges amounted to nothing — no evidence of bribe-taking emerged and he was never placed on trial — and Berlusconi’s newspaper Il Giornale agreed to pay a significant amount in damages and print a long article retracting much of what the newspaper had been saying for several months. But the result of the charges was that Di Pietro was gradually transformed from a major rival of Berlusconi to a mostly marginal figure.
Berlusconi’s attack dogs suffered numerous libel convictions, but by keeping up an almost daily assault on the investigative magistrates, they created enough doubt in the minds of average Italians — and there was little in the supposedly independent press to help them know what to believe — that most voters decided simply not to consider the question of corruption.
One of the things that Berlusconi did by entering politics and militarizing his own media empire was to polarize the entire Italian press corps and eliminate any idea that the press might serve as an independent forum where the claims of the political world could be evaluated with an element of detachment. “The Italian press has undergone a genetic mutation,” says Ferruccio De Bortoli, editor in chief of the Corriere della Sera between 1997 and 2003. “Journalism is seen as having a purely ancillary function to a political design. A paper like the Corriere has traditionally played a role as an independent press institution, moderate but also a watchdog, a check against government power, a place of political and cultural encounter, where different views could clash and listen to one another. That has become much more difficult. Large industrial groups have always had the ability to influence and condition the media, but when one of those groups also runs the government, that brings about a real structural, genetic change.”
De Bortoli knows whereof he speaks. During his years as editor in chief of the Corriere, he says, he felt constant political pressure. The owners of the Corriere and La Stampa are large industrial groups that do a great deal of business with the Italian state. The Fiat car company, which owns La Stampa and is a major shareholder in the Corriere, nearly went bankrupt in 2002-2003. Umberto Agnelli, the company’s chairman, went to Berlusconi to ask for help. According to Prima Pagina, a media magazine based in Milan, he was reportedly told: “We could help, but the Corriere would probably rip the prime minister to shreds. Certainly, that newspaper is becoming more of a problem for you than for us.” The implication was clear: get rid of De Bortoli or you won’t have any help from us. The Berlusconi people were particularly upset about the paper’s coverage of Berlusconi’s several corruption trials. That coverage had been generally straightforward, but the fact that the paper gave any space to the trials — which dealt with bribery, corporate slush funds, and massive, secret overseas bank accounts on Mediaset’s part — was a source of embarrassment and anger. De Bortoli was pressured into resigning. Nor was he the only editor to be pushed out.
In his time, Berlusconi destroyed not only the notion of journalistic objectivity in Italy, but also journalistic autonomy. For Berlusconi, media outlets were either friends or enemies. If you published something damaging about him — the contents of an indictment or the substance of trial testimony — you were obviously an enemy. And since you were an enemy, anything that you published from that point forward could simply be dismissed as an enemy attack. Thus did Berlusconi ensure that he and his supporters no longer had to respond to the substance of what newspapers reported or what magistrates found — the mere fact of its appearing in this paper or that paper meant that it could be dismissed a priori.
What Berlusconi has done in this regard bears a striking resemblance to the American right’s attack on mainstream media: both undermine the idea of objective facts. Journalism has traditionally been attached to the idea that you had a right to your own opinions but not to your own facts. Objectivity may be a myth, but it is a useful myth that encourages journalists to try to maintain a sense of fairness and balance, a healthy respect for the facts, and a sense of obligation to report facts that run counter to their most cherished views. Thus a liberal reader of The Wall Street Journal might reject the views on the paper’s editorial pages but still admire the superb reporting in its news pages. A conservative reader of The New York Times (or a very liberal one, for that matter) might dislike the way the paper has handled various issues but can almost always build a counterargument from facts reported by the paper that perhaps have been given insufficient weight.
Berlusconi, Rupert Murdoch, and others have forged a countermodel in which journalism is purely a political weapon, with any effort at fairness cast aside except as smoke in the eyes of the ingenuous viewer. “Fact number one, France stabbed us in the back,” Bill O’Reilly told his audience at Fox in a program about the split between the U.S. and Europe over the Iraq invasion. Of course, O’Reilly is entitled to his belief that France betrayed the U.S. by not backing the invasion, just as the French are entitled to believe they were merely exercising good judgment. But neither are facts.
When Richard Viguerie, the founder of Conservative Digest magazine and a major figure in the American right, was asked how conservative media could continue making totally unsubstantiated charges against John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign, he replied: “That’s what journalism is. It’s just all opinion. Just opinion.” Although the right has long complained about the moral relativism of modern society, many on the right in Italy and the U.S., by pushing purely partisan journalism, have challenged the notion that there is anything to journalism other than spin.
Both Berlusconi and the American right have tried to eliminate the idea that there are any independent institutions that try to arrive at a set of agreed-upon facts — newspapers, courts, bipartisan commissions. Everything is politicized, so that when a particular entity reaches a conclusion that the right regards as negative it can be used to prove that that entity is “hostile,” and therefore its conclusions can be disregarded.
Although the American press has a healthier tradition of independence than the Italian press, we have begun to see here, too, some of the blurring of lines between press and government that are so common in Italy. It came out in 2005, for example, that the Bush administration paid a prominent syndicated columnist $240,000 to sing the praises of Bush’s main education program (“No Child Left Behind”). That same year, the Government Accountability Office chastised the administration for feeding TV stations ready-to-air news stories that touted administration policies but did not disclose the government as the source; and a Republican party operative was planted in the White House press corps and frequently called upon to ask the president softball questions.
That there are strong parallels between the Italian and American situations is not coincidental. Italy is the European country that has come closest to following the American model of commercial TV. Both Italian and American media are the products of a period of intense deregulation in the 1980s that has produced ever-greater concentration of ownership and a system devoid of any real antitrust or equal-access rules.
The Italian press has recovered slightly from the lowest moments of the Berlusconi era, when the main centrist papers, the Corriere and La Stampa, appeared to have been seriously intimidated by the government. After losing circulation for years as a dull and docile pro-government paper, Turin’s La Stampa recently hired Giulio Anselmi, a fiercely independent journalist, and has begun to regain both readers and respect. The Corriere, under editor Paolo Mieli, who had long advocated political neutrality in journalism, took the unusual step of endorsing a candidate in the national elections in April. Criticizing Berlusconi for spending most of his energies pursuing his own business rather than the nation’s, the paper endorsed the center-left coalition while simultaneously urging committed conservative readers to give their votes to members of the center-right coalition other than Berlusconi.
But recent scandals have shown how deeply entwined the strands of journalism and politics have become in Italy. In July, for example, it came out that the deputy editor of the right-wing newspaper Libero — a journalist who had been granted exclusive private interviews with Berlusconi — was on the payroll of the Italian secret services and served as the conduit for publishing classified dossiers of information that were meant to damage Romano Prodi, the new prime minister. The journalist, Renato Farina, appears to have drawn the ultimate conclusion from the prevailing norms: if you are going to be a journalist in the service of political power, you might as well get paid for it.
To read the articles in the September/October 2006 issue, click here.
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