A second argument, also used by Ginsborg, is that they didn’t do more because they were afraid it would be unpopular. That is, many centre-left politicians reasoned something like this:
anyone who would support our taking action against Berlusconi is likely to vote for us anyway; but
there are a large number of people who would oppose [...]
Assume that the left hasn’t done that much to tackle the issue of Berlusconi’s conflict of interest. Why not?
One explanation might be that many parties within the broad left-wing coalitions, and many individuals within Italian politics more generally, are inclined to forgive past crimes in order to make life easier or to avoid division.
This is [...]
From Matt Frei’s Italy: The Unfinished Revolution (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1996):
“The… consequence of appointing news editors because they represent the right faction rather than the right qualifications is simply that the quality of much of the broadcasting on Rai is sloppy and substandard. News footage tends to look as shaky and out of focus as a [...]