Minerva.as has published an article of mine on the Italian media.

In many countries, a residual sense of national pride means that many claims, which would be readily assented to in a conversation between co-nationals, become hotly contested when made by outsiders. In Italy, the reverse phenomenon seems to operate, and Italians will without hesitation talk up the problems of their country to outsiders, magnifying them beyond their proper proportion.

This phenomenon is particularly acute in the area of the media, where Italians are willing either to ignore or grossly under-estimate the problems that surround the media-politics nexus in other countries in a perverse and paradoxical bid to make Italy the country with the world’s best bad media. This bid enjoys a reasonable prospect of success. Whilst, in other countries, links between politics and the media usually involve obscure overlaps of share-holding and alliances of convenience between media owners and politicians (one thinks of the Hersant empire in France), a far simpler tale can be told about Italy. Usually the tale talks about a land in which everyone lived happily until the arrival of a man called Berlusconi, who came to power and ended press freedom (and everyone lived unhappily ever after).

Read the full article here.