My Two Cents.

The Financial Times has joined The Economist and pockets of the Italian press to denounce the blatant conflict of interest between Silvio Berlusconi's media ownership and his political ambition to become Italy's next prime minister. What the FT and others did not clarify is why this conflict exists and why, under current Italian laws, it cannot be avoided or eliminated.

The core of the problem is that in Italy, freedom of the press is not guaranteed at the constitutional and institutional levels. As a consequence, politicians and industrialists rely on the security of their own media.

In Italy, the media is controlled by three equally rich men: Berlusconi (on the political right), Fiat's Gianni Agnelli (in the center) and Carlo De Benedetti (on the left). These three tycoons, who cannot stomach each other, use the media as a propaganda tool and as a hammer against enemies and competitors. Without their media, they could not survive in the current Italian political and social climate.

This view is not shared by some constitutionalists such as Alessandro Pace, who has written extensively on the subject. Pace, a lawyer and a professor of constitutional rights at La Sapienza University in Rome, claims that the Italian Constitution adequately guarantees freedom of the press and that, in countries like the U.S., the press is too protected.

Even allowing that Italy enjoys freedom of the press constitutionally, in reality Italian judges readily accept cases that other courts, in countries where the press receives powerful constitutional backing, would never entertain.

Recently, a judge in Verona ordered a journalist sued by a public figure to defend himself without being able to ask the accuser if the questions that he asked in print (and for which he was summoned) were accurate. Last year in Italy, punitive damages awarded by the courts to plaintiffs against the press amounted to $1.5 billion. This flashes a clear warning to the independent press (not controlled from "above") that cannot afford the financial risks derived from inquisitive reporting.

The Freedom House, the venerable institution in Washington, D.C. that ranks levels of freedom of the press globally, gives Italy a dangerously high 28 points -- the same level as Hungary, but higher than the Czech Republic (20) and Bolivia (18).

Indeed, the Italian Constitution doesn't accord "freedom of the press," nor does it mention "the right to be informed." Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees "freedom of thought." News, being different from pure thought, doesn't enjoy the same constitutional protection. According to the "Abridged Commentary of the Constitution" by Crisafulli & Paladin (Padova, 1990), "it is not to be assumed that the guarantees of Article 21 are extended to the media."

Another element hindering freedom of the press in Italy is reinforced at the institutional level by the Authority for the Privacy, a state institution that was specifically created to discourage journalists who could otherwise be tempted to write investigative reports on public, political and industrial figures.

The law governing the Authority for the Privacy bypasses the rules used to define defamation by the press. These now-obsolete rules took into consideration the "veracity" of the facts reported, the "social interest" of the story and the "tone" in which the article was written.

In addition, there are other elements in Italy that abridge freedom of the press: the "license" issued by the state (and thus revocable) to practice journalism and the government's large subsidy accorded to a "docile" press.

Therefore, Berlusconi's clear conflict of interest is a direct consequence of the fact that, for anyone to advance politically in Italy, control of the media is a necessity. And with the media knitted to industrial and/or political interests who can well afford punitive court cases, freedom of the press in Italy is, in effect, irrelevant.