Communications watchdog Agcom says that information on television is unbalanced in favour of the government and the parties that compose it. Yawn.
From Le Monde:
Dans une lettre adressée, lundi 24 septembre, à Michel Boyon, président du Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), François Hollande, premier secrétaire du Parti socialiste, et Didier Mathus, député (PS) de Saône-et-Loire et spécialiste des questions de médias, estiment que “l’expression des grands courants politiques dans les médias est gravement déséquilibrée par les interventions […]
Washington Post has an article on Fred Thompson’s candidacy for the Republica nomination. Apparently, if Thompson enters the race officially, summer viewers don’t get their repeats of Law & Order (Thompson plays a District Attorney), due to equal time regulations on free television time to candidates.
The Italian communications watch-dog Agcom has told Rai and commercial broadcasters to give more coverage of the campaign to call a referendum on the current electoral law. The instruction is binding, though any penalty could easily be evaded; but what possible (non-normative) justification can Agcom give for this? Let’s say Agcom finds out that […]
Quomedia reports that politicians in the parliamentary committee that supervises Rai are asking for equal-time limits on political appearances even outside of election periods. I’m not sure why politicians need to have these limits. The most obvious interpretation is that they’ re worried that Rai will be captured by an interfering government. But, as I’ […]
The BBC announced today a review of its coverage of business. The review - which follows previous reviews of coverage of the European Union and the Middle East - will be conducted by a panel of six of the ‘great and the good’, and forms part of the new Trust’s ongoing Impartiality Project.
These […]
I’m just back from the PSA Media and Politics Group conference in Sunderland, where I presented a paper on the screen time given over to Italian politicians. Whilst there, I found out that Guy Starkey has compiled similar data [Powerpoint] on the screen-time given over to different parties on the BBC’s Today programme […]
Earlier this year, the CSA found it had a problem when considering UDF deputies who were dissenting from the government line. Did they count in the government’s share of screen-time according to the ‘rule of three thirds’? The ’sages’ have now resolved the difficulty, with the creation of a new category - neither government, nor […]
RaiNews24 reports that four left-wing politicians (Giorgio Merlo, Margherita; Gennaro Migliore, RC; Loredana de Petris, Verdi; Esterino Montino, DS) have complained to Rai about the broadcast of the ‘Prodi rap’ during a news bulletin. The centre-right, in the shape of Altero Matteoli, accuses the left of stamping out ‘liberty of expression’, which presumably Rai enjoys.
At […]
The media observatory in Pavia regularly collects info on politicians’ time on screen on all Rai channels. Recently, it seems that certain on the right have been complaining about an absence of Berlusconi from Rai’s screens. Mauro Mazza, director of Tg2 - not, I would have thought, a committed centre-left supporter - says some pretty […]
