Looks like the attentive blogger at menteindependente picked up on the 2006 Freedom House report on freedom of the media: Italy remains in 79th place in the world, with a classification of ‘partly free’. Italy is, along with Turkey, the only European country with this classification. Unfortunately, the 2006 report doesn’t seem to be available on the Freedom House site. Perhaps Mediaset (the source cited) jumped the gun on this. The global rankings are available at the Freedom House website.