The Media in Europe After 1992: A Case Study of La Repubblica

Abstract

At the end of July 1990, the Italian media world was rocked by a case of censorship. The Rizzoli publishing company, one of the biggest in the country, suddenly announced it had cancelled plans to publish L'Intrigo (The Intrigue), the story of the attempted hostile takeover of the best-selling Italian dally, La Repubblica. The book was written by the well known journalist Gianpaolo Pansa, deputy editor of La Repubblica. The book was ready for the presses. The last galley proofs had been corrected, the cover was already designed, the first printing had been set for 70,000 copies, and bookstores were already making orders. Rizzoli's decision not to publish was unexpected. A company official told Pansa that the book was too polemical towards people with whom Rizzoli has business relationships. Those "people" were Silvio Berlusconi, the television tycoon who started from scratch and built one of the world's biggest commercial television empires. Berlusconi is the man who tried to take over Rizzoli's rival and the country's biggest publishing company, Mondadori. The company operates fifteen dailies, thirty-five magazines-including the two major newsweeklies- and publishes about 2,000 books a year. And the jewel in the Mondadori crown is La Repubblica the paper, founded in L976, which had revolutionized Italian journalism. Berlusconi succeeded in wresting control of Mondadori from Carlo De Benedetti-who is also the boss of Olivetti-in January 1990. For months, the power struggle grabbed headlines. But by June, following a legal battle that is still not over, De Benedetti was back in command of the publishing company. In August, after fourteen years of prolonged debate and a regulatory vacuum in which Berlusconi flourished, the Italian Parliament finally passed antitrust legislation in the broadcast media sector-a bill which more or less sanctioned the existing division of the television spoils between Berlusconi and the three state run RAI television networks. The events of the summer of 1990 marked the climax of a decade during which newspaper readership more than doubled and the Italian media underwent massive transformations from a politically-subsidized press to a lucrative business now controlled by non-media conglomerates. At the same time, a commercial television sector, dominated almost exclusively by one tycoon, developed alongside the state-run networks. This was made possible by succeeding governments failure-or unwillingness-to apply antitrust laws in the publishing sector and to the total absence of antitrust legislation in the commercial television sector. I propose to show in this paper how the attempted hostile takeover of La Repubblica brought to the attention of Italian public opinion and-belatedly-of Italian politicians the new and extraordinary development of an unparalleled media concentration with political implications that are powerful but still undefined. In Italy today a tiny elite of business barons-newsmakers in their own right, as well as the major advertisers-have become the major media owners.