Conflicts of interest and media pluralism in Italian broadcasting

Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?

“…The same holds for the influence attributed to Silvio Berlusconi, media mogul and former prime minister of Italy (Durante & Knight, 2012). The Italian case has also been studied through the lenses of Berlusconi's media laws and their unilateral coverage (Hibberd, 2007;Padovani, 2012).…”

The web will kill them all: new media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement

“…Since the development of TV in the 1950s and the foundation of RAI, public television channels have been dominated by political parties (Padovani, 2005). In recent years, the leading private TV network, Mediaset, has been owned or indirectly controlled by the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi (Mazzoleni, 2000;Hibberd, 2007;Balbi and Prario, 2010). Nor have the political biases of Italian television been counterweighted by press media: as Peppino…”

Mafia and organised crime in Italy: The unacknowledged successes of law enforcement

“…Except for this provision, however, the general judicial legislation of Berlusconi's government was far from being supportive of prosecutors and judges' work. Besides a series of ad personam bills to solve the judicial problems of the Prime Minister and his closest associates (see Hibberd 2007;Della Porta and Vannucci 2007), the reform of the judicial order proposed by the Justice Minister Roberto Castelli provoked the uproar of the entire Italian magistracy, which went on strike, en masse, four times.…”