ROME – As Italy heads into the age of digital television, growing numbers of discontented Italians are turning off their TV sets and heading out to the theater. Last month, Esterni, a small pro-arts organization in Milan, called on television viewers to strike, offering discount museum and theater tickets around the country to anyone who handed in their TV remote control handset for the day. "We're not political," said Barbara Specchia, one of the strike organizers. "We just think for too many people television is the only source of entertainment, information, and culture. Too many people never look outside." The group has been organizing strikes for seven years, with record results this year as more than 400,000 people switched off. But to many Italians, television is not just a cultural sedative; it has become a pervasive political tool, and spurning television is, therefore, a political gesture. Government figures show that the average Italian watches television for four hours a day and, since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls most of what is broadcast, critics say that the nation is being fed just one political line... Can someone from Italy, living in Italy, share their sense of this dynamic? Mosty true? Mostly false?
Sadly true. He owns mediaset (3 channels) the only real private competitor to statal RAI which btw he manages to control heavily being the prime minister and the leader of majority. But it is also true that in the polls Berlusconi is going down and down. And that... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm.../wl_afp/italy_justice_berlusconi_040113165434 Who is Berlusconi. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64229&highlight=berlusconi
Turning off your tv and going to a theater to pay Hollywood- I imagine L.A. loves this cultural stance.
Reporters sans frontières - Italy - Annual Report 2003 http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6521 More related news http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1108456,00.html http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/12/02/italy.media.law.reut/
Yes it is. Hard times. A mild attempt to a quasi-regime thru medias control. Something already existing in some degree in many of the western societies but surely not that unilateral, brutal and blatant. But we are fighting and he will fall down. Berlusconi is following his megalomania, trying to save his ass from jail (allied with that part of italian political and economical leadership willing to manage things the "italian" way. Let's say... with more creativity and much less honesty), his allies are totally tied to his fate, if they abandon him they will face a sounding defeat in the elections (ie the worst nightmare of politicians lose the power). Anyway... Trust in Berlusconi's government amongst italians. Also the polls show the centre-left coalition ahead of Berlusconi's one.