Any 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.But 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 for them.
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."
Italy's press has always been written by and for the intellectual élite, says Paolo Mancini, a professor of the sociology of communications at the University of Perugia. The culture pages of the major dailies have the air of an academic journal. Graphics and layout are dense and often confusing. Photos are usually portraits of the same tired faces. When political news breaks, the front pages can feature as many as five articles on the subject by leading journalists providing individual takes. Yet context or background is rarely provided. "The reader of the printed press already knows what's going on," says Mancini. "They have the news. What they want is gossip."
While much has been made of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's grip on Italian television — he owns three of the biggest commercial stations and in his role as Premier has influence over state broadcaster RAI — the country's printed press has its own conflicts of interest. The Fiat holding group has controlling stakes in Milan daily Corriere della Sera and Turin-based La Stampa. Daily La Repubblica is owned by Carlo De Benedetti, a business rival of Berlusconi's with interests in energy, automobiles and health care. Il Sole 24 Ore, the country's financial paper, is owned by Italy's main industrial lobby. "Italian entrepreneurs tend to depend largely on Italian politics," says Ricardo Franco Levi, an opposition parliamentarian and the former editor in chief of L'Indipendente, a short-lived 1991 attempt at a truly independent newspaper. "The possibilities of aggressive reporting are very, very limited." (Read: "The Berlusconi Tapes: 5 Ways to Evade the Scandal.")
Direct government influence is not out of the question in modern Italy, either. In June, Berlusconi urged companies not to buy space in publications "that sing the songs of dissatisfaction and catastrophe" — a reference to newspapers covering the salacious allegations surrounding the Prime Minister's personal life. "Would this be accepted in any other corner of the world?" asks Levi. "The Prime Minister telling companies where to place their ads?"
It's no wonder Italians are increasingly turning to alternative sources of information. The last few years have seen the rise of free dailies, handed to commuters outside subway stops. With limited budgets that rule out big-name commentators, they've had to offer their readers something new: straight news.
On a recent Thursday, when the front page of La Repubblica offered three articles on Berlusconi's admission that he was "not a saint," the free Metro carried a much more relevant headline: "H1N1: 15 Million Youth To Be Vaccinated." Online, Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned political blogger, has a large, vocal following. As does dagospia.com, Italy's left-wing retort to the Drudge Report. Read: "Blog di Beppe Grillo."
The crisis shaking media houses across the world has made no exception for Italy. In a country where layoffs are all but forbidden, more than 500 journalists are expected to lose their jobs in September. Yet the demand for a different type of reporting remains striking. Last fall, I attended a festival of international journalism organized by the magazine Internazionale, a weekly compilation of foreign news sources. Attendees overflowed the auditoriums, then sat in the piazzas to listen to the proceedings over loudspeakers. In an era of plunging circulation, sales of Internazionale grew 25% last year. "The people who stop buying papers aren't people who don't want information any more," says the title's editor in chief Giovanni De Mauro. "They're people looking for a different type of information." In Italy, at least, publishers looking to save their papers could start by satisfying readers' hunger.
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