My two cents.

Freedom of speech should be not a matter of opinion but a matter of course. The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling protecting online speech, sexually explicit or otherwise, compares favorably with the law severely limiting freedom of speech that was recently approved by the Italian Parliament. One is prompted to compare the two because both deal with something that could be considered obscene.

Italy, of course, sorely lacks anything resembling America's Bill of Rights. It is interesting to note that in Italy it was the center-left government that worked to restrict freedom of speech, while in the U.S. it is the right that seeks to chisel away at the First Amendment by leveraging sexuality.

After the Italian press reported magistrates' intentions of questioning FlAT boss Cesare Romiti before Romiti himself was notified, the Italian Parliament moved swiftly to approve the so-called "privacy law" for both public and private individuals. In effect, this law prevents any Italian news organization from reporting on the doings of public figures during their time off. In other words, if the Minister of Defense takes anti-depressants at home, the public doesn't have to know. Actors, who pay PR firms to get them into the press, now get to decide what is printed about them. In certain cases, the "privacy law" even prevents the press from reporting on public figures when they are performing their paid duties. For example, the Italian press can no longer report the extent of injuries suffered by soccer players during public games.

Not that the press is blameless. Indeed, it went too far when it persisted in maliciously reporting excruciatingly personal details about any private individual who got involved in some sort of news story. Such actions, however, could have been dealt with by simply passing a "non-public figure" privacy law.

Now, the questions. Why didn't the Italian press see it coming? Why didn't the journalists complain about the restriction of their sacrosanct freedom? And why didn't some of the politicians protest?

The answer is tied to all the questions. It is possible that the Italian press went too far deliberately in order to trigger a reactionary parliamentary action.

Why would the press do this? In Italy, control of the press is concentrated in a few hands: those of Silvio Berlusconi, the FlAT group, Carlo De Benedetti and, in the case of the state-owned RAI TV networks, the PDS (left) political party. Each group kept blasting away at the heads of its competitors, to the point of publicizing their home addresses and the square footage of their houses. It's possible that the owners pushed their organizations to go too far so that the scrutiny would stop.

The media's reporting was selective, however, since it never explained where the money for the defense of corrupt (and technically poorly paid) politicians came from.

The muted response from the politicians in the opposition parties may be due to ties with one or another of the media groups. In addition, it is the nature of politicians the world over to want to avoid being scrutinized by the press.

If investigative reporting in Italy was critically ill before, this restriction of freedom of speech ensures that it cannot be cured. To paraphrase Mae West, this law encourages "depression, repression and suppression."