ROME: Lucia Ricci was beginning to think Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was following her. The media tycoon’s face beamed down at her from billboards near her home. He grinned at her from magazines. When she switched on the car radio, she heard him and when she turned on the television, there he was, exchanging jokes on late-night comedy shows and charming grandmothers on breakfast television.

“He’s amazing. Amazing. I kept thinking he was going to step out of a poster,” she said, laughing down the telephone from Milano Tre, a new town on Milan’s outskirts built by Berlusconi early in his business career.

Berlusconi’s month-long media onslaught on television and radio alternately entertained and appalled many Italians until it was brought to an end in February when strict broadcasting rules kicked in ahead of the April 9 and 10 general election.

The billionaire, whose family controls Italy’s largest private broadcaster Mediaset, is trailing in the polls ahead of the vote, and his media blitz was aimed at spreading his feel-good message and lambasting the centre-left opposition.

Berlusconi’s critics believe the prime minister has single-handedly compromised press freedom with a grip on the media that is unparalleled among the world’s seven most industrialized nations.

But if opinion polls are correct and Berlusconi’s centre-right government loses the April vote, Italy will not miraculously spring to the top of press freedom tables.

“Berlusconi’s conflict of interests is well noted. If he loses, that will diminish. But Italian media has always been politicized, to the left and the right, and that will continue,” said Michele Polo, a professor at Milan’s Bocconi University.

Reporters without Borders ranked Italy 42nd in its 2005 press freedom table, below Benin and El Salvador.

The media watchdog said the lowly ranking was partly because Berlusconi directly and indirectly controls as much as 85 per cent of Italian television and also because of judicial pressure on journalists to reveal their sources.

Berlusconi’s family empire spans television, books, movies, radio, magazines, advertising and football champions AC Milan.

But the Milan banker’s son, who says his conflict of interest is a myth, does not own everything.

“Berlusconi never penetrated the media of the left,” said Lucia Annunziata, state broadcaster RAI’s former chairwoman, who quit her office in 2004 complaining the network had become just a ‘mail box’ for Berlusconi’s coalition.

Other business tycoons less wealthy than Berlusconi, who is ranked by Forbes as the world’s 25th richest person, dominate Italy’s main newspapers, including the venerable Corriere della Sera, the country’s most widely read and influential daily.

The left lobby also has a powerful voice in RAI, whose overall political affiliation flips to whoever is in power.

The Fiat car dynasty owns newspaper La Stampa and their executives, including Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo, sit on the boards of Corriere and business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, which in turn is owned by Italy’s main employers’ organization.

“All the newspapers have their own conflict of interest because they are protected by the businessmen, businessmen that Berlusconi has not been able to dominate,” Annunziata said.

Italy’s media is so politically coloured that Sky Italia, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and sibling to US flag-waving Fox TV, is considered to be the most neutral national news source.—Reuters