Yesterday I ran across this item from the NYTimes. It deals with the ongoing Italian election campaign, which I'm following on the ground in northern Italy by reading the Italian newspapers. It's a good example of the sort of content that makes readers distrust the media in direct proportion to their level of knowledge on a given subject. If I didn't know better, I'd've thought this was a pretty good, though not very deep, report on a specific controversy. It's not.
The report is about how Silvio Berlusconi is outmaneuvering his opposition by using his media properties and pressuring the government to extend the legislative session by two weeks. Each individual item in the report is true, of course; the problem is what's left out. Berlusconi got the extension of the legislative session, but what he'd asked for was that plus a postponement of the general election from 9 April until early May. He didn't get that. The outcome was a compromise. Why Berlusconi (the Cavalier, as the press calls him) wanted the election postponed is obvious--he's trailing badly in the polls because of a raft of corruption charges that have been dogging him for years. The reason why he wanted the extension of the legislative session is more complicated. One reason--a bill that's been sent back to the legislature for more work--is too squirrely to quickly describe, and not really interesting to anyone who doesn't already follow Italian politics. The other reason involves his media properties. A law has been passed that will require broadcasters to devote equal time to the opposition during the campaign. This law will kick in when the legislature adjourns. Berlusconi wants the extra time to use his media properties to flood the public with his image. This aspect of the extension is under continuing debate; it's possible that the government will put the equal time law into effect before the legislature adjourns.
Why does the Times article not fill us in? Well, there could be many reasons. The details may have gotten cut during editing. The reporter, Ian Fisher, covers a lot of territory, which would cultivate a habit of simplifying. Or he may like Berlusconi, though his other reports on Italian politics wouldn't necessarily support that. More likely it's a case of over-convenient framing.
Two key frames characterize the article. One is Berlusconi the sly survivor. Choosing this frame calls forth the expert commentary on how he's going to come from behind, which (and I admit I'm rooting against him) is partisan cheerleading. A left partisan wants to read this treatment as biased.
The other key frame is the one you find most common in US coverage of foreign elections. It is the Americanization theme, which also emphasizes television. Every British election since I started paying attention, for instance, has been written about as the "first American election" in that country, meaning that it's the first one in which television dominates the discourse.
The Americanization theme understates the issue in Italy, though. It's not television, it's the (more or less) monopoly control of television that's the issue, and it's way beyond US proportions. Berlusconi is not merely the Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch of Italy. His media empire is really unrivaled within the country. He dominates broadcasting the way that right wing voices in the US dominate talk radio. But hey, talk radio is just radio, and the right wing isn't just one guy.
The cavalier's stranglehold on the broadcast environment resembles the state of the US media before the great depression. Then a media mogul like William Randolph Hearst seemed to exercise such power that a wide array of ordinary people wanted the federal government to control media ownership, or set up public alternatives to the commercial media, or do other things that made media owners in general run scared of "communistic" schemes and even try to clean up their own houses. The depression ended Hearst's glory days, and the "professional" standards that came out of this turmoil reassured the public that the power of the press wouldn't be exploited for personal political ambitions.
Since World War II, it's been considered unsophisticated in the US to believe that the media can manipulate public opinion. The US media system is supposed to be too diverse and too disciplined (by professional standards AND by the market) for this to happen. Reporters especially believe this, and are actually reassured that BOTH the left and the right think they're biased. This complacency gets transferred to other national contexts in mainstream reporting, unless some explicit form of censorship or government ownership is involved. So any US professional reporter is more or less programmed to think of the private sector as the area of freedom, and to think of a mogul like Berlusconi as a colorful scalawag rather than a threat to democracy. On the other hand, a publicly owned broadcast system (like RAI in Italy) will be much more suspect.
Too longwinded, this post, but here's the point. There's a systematic blindness to the problem of media monopoly in US news discourse, and it makes it difficult to see how bad things can get. Things can get pretty damned bad. You know, Italy wound up in Iraq too.
The report is about how Silvio Berlusconi is outmaneuvering his opposition by using his media properties and pressuring the government to extend the legislative session by two weeks. Each individual item in the report is true, of course; the problem is what's left out. Berlusconi got the extension of the legislative session, but what he'd asked for was that plus a postponement of the general election from 9 April until early May. He didn't get that. The outcome was a compromise. Why Berlusconi (the Cavalier, as the press calls him) wanted the election postponed is obvious--he's trailing badly in the polls because of a raft of corruption charges that have been dogging him for years. The reason why he wanted the extension of the legislative session is more complicated. One reason--a bill that's been sent back to the legislature for more work--is too squirrely to quickly describe, and not really interesting to anyone who doesn't already follow Italian politics. The other reason involves his media properties. A law has been passed that will require broadcasters to devote equal time to the opposition during the campaign. This law will kick in when the legislature adjourns. Berlusconi wants the extra time to use his media properties to flood the public with his image. This aspect of the extension is under continuing debate; it's possible that the government will put the equal time law into effect before the legislature adjourns.
Why does the Times article not fill us in? Well, there could be many reasons. The details may have gotten cut during editing. The reporter, Ian Fisher, covers a lot of territory, which would cultivate a habit of simplifying. Or he may like Berlusconi, though his other reports on Italian politics wouldn't necessarily support that. More likely it's a case of over-convenient framing.
Two key frames characterize the article. One is Berlusconi the sly survivor. Choosing this frame calls forth the expert commentary on how he's going to come from behind, which (and I admit I'm rooting against him) is partisan cheerleading. A left partisan wants to read this treatment as biased.
The other key frame is the one you find most common in US coverage of foreign elections. It is the Americanization theme, which also emphasizes television. Every British election since I started paying attention, for instance, has been written about as the "first American election" in that country, meaning that it's the first one in which television dominates the discourse.
The Americanization theme understates the issue in Italy, though. It's not television, it's the (more or less) monopoly control of television that's the issue, and it's way beyond US proportions. Berlusconi is not merely the Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch of Italy. His media empire is really unrivaled within the country. He dominates broadcasting the way that right wing voices in the US dominate talk radio. But hey, talk radio is just radio, and the right wing isn't just one guy.
The cavalier's stranglehold on the broadcast environment resembles the state of the US media before the great depression. Then a media mogul like William Randolph Hearst seemed to exercise such power that a wide array of ordinary people wanted the federal government to control media ownership, or set up public alternatives to the commercial media, or do other things that made media owners in general run scared of "communistic" schemes and even try to clean up their own houses. The depression ended Hearst's glory days, and the "professional" standards that came out of this turmoil reassured the public that the power of the press wouldn't be exploited for personal political ambitions.
Since World War II, it's been considered unsophisticated in the US to believe that the media can manipulate public opinion. The US media system is supposed to be too diverse and too disciplined (by professional standards AND by the market) for this to happen. Reporters especially believe this, and are actually reassured that BOTH the left and the right think they're biased. This complacency gets transferred to other national contexts in mainstream reporting, unless some explicit form of censorship or government ownership is involved. So any US professional reporter is more or less programmed to think of the private sector as the area of freedom, and to think of a mogul like Berlusconi as a colorful scalawag rather than a threat to democracy. On the other hand, a publicly owned broadcast system (like RAI in Italy) will be much more suspect.
Too longwinded, this post, but here's the point. There's a systematic blindness to the problem of media monopoly in US news discourse, and it makes it difficult to see how bad things can get. Things can get pretty damned bad. You know, Italy wound up in Iraq too.
posted by jnerone at 1:50 PM
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