My British and American friends used to laugh at me about Berlusconi. Between Trump and Boris, they're not laughing anymore.
And why regulating new and emerging media is the real lesson from the Berlusconi years.
As a subscriber of this newsletter, you’ll know that I’ve often focused on the similarities between former Italian PM and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, for example in my aptly -titled post ‘Bunga vs Boris’. Berlusconi, and to an extent Italy itself, was often seen as a laughing stock, especially in the UK/US. He symbolised all the crass stereotypes of the sleazy, corrupt Italian man. But as the world was laughing, it was missing the point. Missing the damage to democracy that years of flouting the law and controlling the media was having in Italy. And now that Trump and Johnson are also in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, my British and American friends aren’t laughing anymore.
I wish I was saying that with shadenfreude, but mainly there’s just deep sadness, and more than a tinge of worry.
In this Channel 4 News interview that I gave on the day Berlusconi died, Krishnan Guru-Murthy refers to him as the ‘Godfather of populists’. There’s some truth to that. Berlusconi was ranting about a corrupt, ‘Communist’ judiciary that had a vendetta against him way back when Trump and Boris were still married to their first wives.
We can focus on Bunga, general lechery, trouble with the law (and with the truth) but having thought about it for a couple of days, I think there is one main lesson that we need to learn from the Berlusconi legacy if we’re going to avoid that kind of concentration of power in other countries:
The need to regulate new and emerging media.
Calling Berlusconi a media tycoon doesn’t really paint the whole picture. If Donald Trump’s catchphrase was “You’re fired”, Berlusconi’s might as well have been “You’re hired”. But rather than on a reality TV programme, it was for Italy’s main news programmes. It’s a safe estimate to assume that Berlusconi employed roughly half of the country’s broadcast journalists.
That kind of influence cannot be overestimated. In my 20+ year career as a journalist, the only time I was ever told to ‘watch what you say’ was in Italy, during one of Berlusconi’s stints in power. And it wasn’t even on one of his channels.
Of the seven terrestrial TV channels in Italy, Berlusconi owned three of the most successful commercial ones, part of his Mediaset empire, each with its dedicated news programming. Because of the way the Italian state broadcaster RAI is run, whoever is in government also has a say on appointing the editors of the 3 RAI channels. So whenever Berlusconi was in Government, he had sway over 90% of the TV output in a country where most people inform themselves through Television rather than print.
I remember the surreal scenes in 1994, during his first election campaign, when high profile TV presenters, not just news anchors but the faces of prime-time entertainment programmes, would casually turn to camera and extol the virtues of their boss and political candidate. Unsurprisingly, he won the election.
How such a blatant conflict of interest was allowed to happen in the first place is a valid question, and points to Berlusconi being anything but the buffoon he was often painted as by the anglophone media. By buying small, local TV stations in the 70s and linking them all into a national service he effectively created commercial television in Italy, at a time when the broadcast frequencies were still dominated by RAI.
He formed his new media empire before the legislation was in place to regulate it and prevent the blatant conflict of interest that ensued.
After that, all he had to do was to make sure that such legislation would never be passed.
Trying to exert control over the media is high on any Populist Leader’s to-do list, but the situation created in Italy by Berlusconi is unique among democracies. And it contains a valuable lesson for the present day: What new media are we seeing emerge that we don’t yet have adequate legislation to regulate? Can we prevent or even predict future abuses? After all, Berlusconi created his media empire more than a decade before he decided to enter politics (and many think he entered politics specifically to shield his business interests). That lead to an enormous concentration of media power in the hands of one man.
But today, one man owns Twitter, the closest thing we have to a global town square. One man owns Facebook, which counts its users in the billions. Both men have often been called geniuses. I’m not passing judgement, but for the record, so has Berlusconi.
Berlusconi’s media ownership didn’t just let him control his image - it also lets him control the agenda, which is particularly useful when you’re in government. His channels broadcast incessant debates on immigration, the war on terror and minority rights issues, which in turn became difficult for other media outlets to ignore. All of it couched in terms of ‘immigrant invasion’ and ‘muslim threat’. These themes became easy ground for his right-wing political movement to dominate, both on the airwaves and, eventually, in the polls.
It is easy to focus on scandals, trials and off-colour jokes. It is also right that we expose wrong doing. That’s why control of the media is the single most important aspect of the Berlusconi legacy, and making parallels with the threats of today is crucial.
One of the things I love most about writing this newsletter is the total freedom I enjoy, in choosing the topics that I think will interest you and covering them in an honest way that’s free from outside influences.
Believe me, that freedom is rarer than you’d think and should never be taken for granted. That’s the lesson I learnt from Silvio Berlusconi.
I think this is the most perceptive article I've read in a very long time. A great insight into the common factors behind what's gone wrong in Italy, UK and USA in recent times. I can't help believing that it would be wonderful for the UK if Barbara Serra became Prime Minister one day.