Hendonblog

The April 8 issue of The New York Review of Books has an article entitled “The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio”  written by Alexandre Stille, a professor of journalism at Columbia. It is about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his enduring popularity in the face of repeated scandals. It may just be the Italians, but the article focuses on how the prime minister’s media empire influences public opinion in his favor.

First, some of the scandals. He has a peculiar relationship with a teenage girl from Naples, Noemi Letzia, who calls him “Papi.” Is she his illegitimate daughter or one of his lovers? Says his wife, Veronica Letizia: “I wish she was his daughter.”  The wife has publically asked for a divorce. Then there were the photographs of a party with topless women and pantless male politicians at his pleasure palace on Sardinia. And call girls show up at parties in the presidential palace in Rome. For sixteen years he has been fighting legal charges of corruption, bribery, and ties to organized crime. He had gotten Senate and Chamber of Deputies to pass a law giving him immunity while he was still in office, but last October Italy’s highest court threw the law out.

Now comes the role of media. On December 5, 350,000 Italians attended a “No to Berlusconi Day in Rome. The defenders of Berlusconi said the few newspapers and magazines that dared criticize Berlusconi had created “a climate of hate.” Berlusconi owned television stations, radio stations, and newspapers launched character attacks on his critics. In response parliament passed another law to protect him from prosecution. His poll numbers remains high even as he appoints attractive showgirls to government positions. Probably the most important thing that Berlusconi media do is to make sure that many Italians never hear about the scandals. He has bragged, “Don’t you realize that something does not exist—not an idea, a politician or a product—unless it is on television.” The one area of media that Berlusconi does not control is new media, but so far his critics have not been able to use these effectively. Meanwhile Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini has made a documentary about all this called “Videocracy.” AP has written of it: “Take a sex scandal, add scantily clad women in a culture where television lies at the nexus of power and politics, and the result is SEX, THIGHS AND VIDEOCRACY.” I’ve got to see it.