“I want a situation without censorship, because I do not want to be responsible for whatever they may say” – Napoleon I, letter to M. Fouché, Jun 1, 1805.
Source: Baker, D. (ed)., Political Quotations (Gale: Detroit), 70
I’m currently waiting on the data from Journalist ‘05, a regular (every five years) survey of Swedish journalists, which are as I write being turned into book form by Prof. Kent Asp and colleagues. In the meantime, here are some results from the 2000 survey:
Public
Journalists
SVT Journalists
Left
15
31
33
Social Democrats
32
27
23
Centre
4
3
2
People’s Party
5
14
17
Moderates
25
10
6
Greens
6
10
14
Christian Democrats
13
5
5
Journalists in general are more left-libertarian [...]
The ‘Bonsai’ column in Repubblica has, over the past few months, been painting a wonderful picture of Vannino Chiti – Minister in charge of relationships with Parliament – as a type of electoral Lieutenant Columbo. From Wikipedia:
Columbo’s signature technique was to exit the scene of an interview, invariably stopping in the doorway or returning a [...]
In my thesis, I claimed that “there is no available polling evidence on whether Italians believe Rai to be independent of the government”. That’s not quite right. There’s no public polling data, but I’ve hit the jackpot through trawling through the catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale: I’ve got Rai’s own internal data.
Granted, it’s from [...]
Even better data from this 2003 CSA / Marianne poll on l’image des journalistes: 23% of French people think the media are independent of “political power”, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, Jean-Pierre Pernaud, and Claire Chazal are cited as particularly independent. Cross-tabs are included!
Via a long chain of googling too tedious to repeat, I find a wonderful poll on public attitudes towards French journalists. My interest was drawn to the question on public perceptions of journalistic independence. Two questions are asked, one on independence from political parties, and one on independence from economic concerns. Here’s the time-series on [...]
From Today’s Repubblica (Vladimiro Polchi, “I costi dello stato”, p. 9):
“How much does a parliamentarian earn? The calculation is not easy given the number of different headings to add. Senators and deputie take home euro 14,000 per month net of taxes. To the exemption of 5,486 euros (reduced by 10% with the 2006 budget) one [...]
From repubblica.it comes information on the size of constituencies in the new electoral system proposed in the ‘bozza Chiti’. They will be ’sub-provinciale’, at most, ‘provinciale’.
Let’s assume conservatively that the constituencies will be equal to the number of provinces.
Let’s also assume, as a simplifying measure, that the constituencies will all be given the same number [...]
Rai today agreed a new service contract with the Communications Minister Paolo Gentiloni. According to this write-up, the contract was extensively modified after parliamentary hearing. The one big word to take away from the process (or two words, for Ritchie-Bartlett watchers)? Unfunded mandate:
Il problema e’ che secondo un conteggio ‘interno’ alla Rai, queste modifiche [...]
Repubblica and the Corriere both report that the centre-left majority has reached agreement on electoral reform. The reform will replace the current law with a system similar to that used for regional elections. The text therefore is close to joint position of the centre-right, which augurs well for its chances of quick passage. By including [...]