Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has a way with words.

A Virtuoso at Playing the Press in Italy

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

L'Europa non ha un leader più satireggiato del Primo Ministro Italiano Silvio Berlusconi, che recentemente ha fatto notizia paragonando un collega Tedesco nel Parlamento Europeo a un kapo dei campi di concentramento nazisti. Questo self-made media tycoon ha sempre avuto uno strano stile con le parole.

"L'America? Io amo l'America", ha detto a un reporter Americano nel mezzo della sua campagna elettorale del 2001. "Io sono da qualsiasi parte l'America stia, ancora prima di sapere di cosa si tratta".

Un'idea del potere e follia di Mister Berlusconi è possibile farsela guardando stanotte "Wide Angle", un programma sttimanale PBS sugli affari internazionali. Questo episodio, intitolato "Il Primo Ministro e la Stampa" mette a fuoco come il controllo di Mr. Berlusconi sulla televisione Italiana abbia ostacolato la libertà di stampa in Italia. La sua media company, Mediaset, controlla tre principali canali privati, mentre il suo governo sorveglia i tre canali state-controlled.

Già basita per quanto letto su un quotidiano straniero come THE NEW YORK TIMES, stampo il resto dell'articolo in lingua originale. Domanda: "Ma ce l'hanno tutti con noi, in quanto guidati da Berlusconi?"

No politician looks statesmanlike while singing and waving flags at his own campaign rallies, and Mr. Berlusconi, 66, who was a crooner on a cruise ship in college and used his soccer team, A.C. Milan, to start his political career, has more embarrassing news clips than most. He has also been dogged by charges of corruption for more than a decade and has just won passage of a law in Parliament that grants him immunity from prosecution while in office, derailing a trial he was facing in Milan. Italian politics, as minor league as they are baroque, are more easily mocked than explained.

To their credit, the producers resist the temptation to paint Mr. Berlusconi as a buffoon or a Mussolini Mini-Me. Yet that same Anglo-Saxon sense of fairness and restraint is also a liability. It is a trusting world view that cannot quite capture what is different about Italian journalism and Italian society and why it is that Mr. Berlusconi gets away with such outlandish statements and acts.

The Italian press is not built on the American model. As in many other European countries, only more so, Italian newspapers and magazines are ideological and opinionated, and facts are not always ruthlessly checked.

With a few exceptions the Italian media are not fair, balanced or tenacious. They were noisy but pliant under previous governments, and they are now ill-prepared to fend off the far more shameless incursions of the current prime minister.

"Wide Angle" persuades viewers that the Italian prime minister is bad news for the press. But by casting Italian journalists as oppressed champions of free speech and fairness, "Wide Angle" misses the chance to explain why in some ways the Italian press got the prime minister it deserves.

The clues are there, however. The documentary focuses extensively on Mario Travaglio, a young, slim reporter who is introduced by the narrator as "one of Italy's most respected investigative reporters."

Mr. Travaglio could more accurately be described as one of Italy's few investigative reporters. It is not a crowded field. Mr. Travaglio is a dogged muckracker. His book "The Odor of Money" charges that Mr. Berlusconi's first real estate ventures in the 1970's relied on financing from associates with mob ties, a rumor that has floated around the billionaire for years but that has not been upheld in any of his trials on charges of financial misconduct.

The documentary does not point out until much later that Mr. Travaglio is also a correspondent for L'Unità, which it describes as a "small, leftist paper." L'Unità was once the newspaper of the Communist Party and the most powerful left-wing news organization in Italy. It is small, and foundering, but it is still financed by an offshoot of the old Communist Party, the Democrats of the Left, which is the main opposition party to Mr. Berlusconi.

That does not mean Mr. Travaglio's reports about Mr. Berlusconi's misdeeds are wrong. Instead it suggests what the documentary leaves out: that investigative reporting in Italy is so difficult and so unrewarding (Mr. Berlusconi in particular sues critics with abandon) that only the most passionate and partisan journalists make the effort.

The most respected investigative reporting on Mr. Berlusconi is not in any Italian publication but in The Economist, which in its Aug. 2 issue published an open letter to Mr. Berlusconi demanding answers to 28 questions about his 1985 financial dealings that were to have been raised in court before the immunity law was passed. The Economist justifies its zeal by citing Mr. Berlusconi as "Europe's most extreme case of the abuse by a capitalist of the democracy within which he lives and operates."

The documentary rightly points out that after the election some television personalities lost their jobs at the state-controlled network RAI for criticizing Mr. Berlusconi on the air just before the voting. But it takes too seriously the whining of RAI reporters who evoke a dark conspiracy of advertisers and executives at Mr. Berlusconi's Mediaset for RAI's declining ratings.

Mediaset was outperforming RAI long before Mr. Berlusconi took office for the simple reasons that its programming was flashier and better and its operations more modern and more efficient.

The documentary often quotes Enzo Biagi, 83, one of the television commentators who was taken off the air after criticizing Mr. Berlusconi. He is a symbol of respectable Italian journalism, but he is also a reminder of the gerontocracy that still controls Italy media and much more; the documentary is packed with trim, elderly experts who are a tribute to the Mediterranean diet and mandarin rule. And there is far less mobility and opportunity in academia or medicine than there is in journalism. Even business is still in the grip of spritely elders.

Mr. Berlusconi won the 2001 election for many reasons, but one that is often discounted is that he promised sweeping change to a country that badly needs it. "Wide Angle" does a good job of illustrating how he has instead made sweeping changes that suit his own interests. The show has a harder time explaining to an American audience how he got there in the first place.

THE NEW YORK TIMES - 21 AGOSTO 2003