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 The cat's meow
Berlusconi is probably one of more megalomaniac politicians currently in office with the possible exception of North Korea's Kim Jong Il. . He thinks he is the cat's meow. At a recent joint press conference with Spain's premier José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, he answered a provocative question by a journalist form the Spanish daily El Pais by saying he was "the best prime minister Italy had ever had in 150 years of history" (hardly true) and telling the questioner his newspaper was on the brink of bankruptcy . The call girl he entertained last year at his Rome residence recounts that before going to bed he made her watch a video showing him with other world leaders. And the occasion for the TV broadcast -- his handover of 47 wooden homes - to a tiny fraction of those left homeless by last spring's earthquake in and around L'Acquila in Italy's Abruzzo region - was treated with a ridiculous amount of fanfare, and leading to the postponement of a popular news program that was to have aired at that time. The program got only a 13% audience share as many preferred a mini-drama on one of Berlusconi's channels or the soccer match between Marseilles and Milan (the team owned by Berlusconi). In general, Berlusconi has never been able to tolerate criticism and has been particularly infuriated by the recent coverage of his sex and social life by newspapers, including one - La Repubblica - which for months now has been waging a press campaign against him not so much because they think they can get him to resign (personally, I would bet he will NEVER resign, no matter what comes up next) but to discredit him enough to weaken his government and, above all, make sure he never tries to become a candidate for Italy's president of the Republic, the most respected post in the land. There is no doubt that Italian journalists are often politically motivated and tend to do sloppy reporting based more on hearsay than anything else. They also think nothing of printing material leaked from what should be confidential judicial investigations or wiretaps. But it certainly is part of their job to report on Berlusconi's behavior as well as his lifestyle (toda's papers contain reports about drug use at a party he held in August 008 at his summer residence in Sardinia. Berlusconi's latest answer to the aggressiveness of the press - along with various insults regarding journalists - has been to file lawsuits against two Italian dailies and a couple of foreign ones. But the cries of an attack on freedom of the press appear exaggerated (and shifting a program from Tuesday to Thursday hardly seems worthy of sparking a revolt). Furthermore, although it is disturbing to many Italians (and a lot of foreigners) that Mr. B. controls so much of the media (three TV stations of his own, a daily newspaper and as prime minister significant influence over RAI, the State radio and television network) this situation has existed ever since he entered politics in 1994 and at least two center-left governments since then failed to address the issue. It has to be said however that despite the Italian television anomaly there is really no indication that freedom of the press - as a whole - is threatened here, and the nearly 100 newspapers now published here (not to mention the magazines and other periodicals, cover a vast range of opinion. The Italian state in fact gives over 700 million euros a year in subsidies to papers of ever political stripe possible. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that most of the books written by Berlusconi's most vociferous critics are published here by Mondadori, the publishing house he himself has owned now for over a decade.
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