Gore Vidal, writing in the Times in 1987 (’Italian genius: put it down to curiosity’, 17 November):
In journalism, Italians are perhaps more politicized than their English or American counterparts. But then they have more politics. On the other hand, as they have no class war to write about, they are obliged to fill their [...]
From reporters san frontières:
Year
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
Rank
40
53
39
52
40
35
Total countries
139
166
167
167
168
169
Unfortunately, no disaggregated scores are available. Similar trends to those seen in the Freedom House survey can be seen.
From Freedom House:
Aspect
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
Status
Free
Free
Partly Free
Partly Free
Partly Free
Free
Free
Legal Environment
2
8
11
9
9
9
10
Political Influences
11
6
13
13
13
11
10
Economic Pressures
14
14
9
13
13
9
9
Total Score
27
28
33
35
35
29
29
Ranking
none given
none given
74
joint 77 with Bolivia, Bulgaria, Mongolia, the Philippines
joint 79 with Botswana
joint 61 with Cape Verde, Guyana, Israel, Sao Tome e Principe
joint 65 with Samoa
Scores are from 0 – 100; higher scores are worse.
It should be obvious that press freedom declines when Silvio Berlusconi is [...]
(1) From Scannell and Cardiff’s Social History of British Broadcasting (vol. I, p. 118):
“An austere conception of news values continued to govern the selection of material for broadcasting. When news of the quality required was lacking no efforts were made to pad out the bulletins to a standard length. On Good Friday 1930, in the [...]
Just the English language stuff for the moment…
[ALS+04]
Avilés, J.A.G., B. León, K. Sanders and J. Harrison. Journalists at digital television newsrooms in Britain and Spain: workflow and multi-skilling in a competitive environment. Journalism Studies, 5(1):87–100, 2004.
[GL]
Graham, H. and J. Labanyi. Spanish cultural studies. Oxford University Press.
[GMW00]
Gunther, R., J.R. Montero and J.I. Wert. Democracy [...]
Welcome decision from the Sarkozy government, which clarifies that any reforms to the governance of France Télévisions will not curtail the term in office of group president Patrick de Carolis.
Interesting suggestions for reform of the electoral system used for the European Parliament elections found here at RENA:
twenty-one electoral districts, with
at least one seat per district, with
remaining (57?) seats distributed in proportion to population, thus
increasing the effective threshold, if not the legal threshold;
and introducing a quota for female representation
We’ve seen before that Italian politicians don’t know much about the electoral systems of other countries. Now we see that they don’t know much about federalism in other countries either. According to Umberto Bossi,
“Senza il federalismo fiscale, c’e’ il rischio reale che il Paese diventi come l’Argentina…”
“Without fiscal federalism, there’s a real risk that [...]
Once upon a time, there were party newspapers: funded by the parties, staffed by the parties, sold to party sympathizers. Or, there were partisan rags, which even if they didn’t have a party connection, seemed as if they did.
According to a number of (predominantly-American) social scientists, partynewspapers declined as the capital costs of launching a [...]