One departure, one arrival, and one return from the brink: Michael Grade left the BBC. The decision was broken, as I understand it, in the Telegraph, and confirmed this morning. No news yet on salary, but it may top £2m. No news yet on how how he will be replaced. A former surgeon, acting Chair [...]
There is but one lacuna in Alexander Stille’s otherwise excellent piece ‘Silvio’s Shadow’: it is not true that Berlusconi “occupied an incredible 50 percent of airtime on the state-owned newscasts”. Data from the Italian communications watchdog show the figure for the three state-owned channels was closer to 20%. The quite remarkable figure of 50% of [...]
The Garante della Concorrenza has just ruled that Berlusconi didn’t violate conflict of interest rules when his government approved aid for digital TV decoders. Ruling is available here, English summary here. I can’t say that I’m very impressed with the quality of the ruling. The MSN report linked to above gives a very partial account [...]
Following on from yesterday’s post, there seems no third way to resolve the tremendous conflict of interest posed by Berlusconi’s control of the media. Whilst in many other countries, existing anti-trust or media legislation would be used to break up or otherwise ameliorate Mediaset’s dominant position in the Italian media, that doesn’t seem possible in [...]