As TV gets political, Italians turn it off: Government figures show that the average Italian watches television for four hours a day and, since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls most of what is broadcast, critics say that the nation is being fed just one political line.
According to one of Italy's leading authors, Umberto Eco, Italy is living under a new kind of dictatorship, the "media regime." The difference between Benito Mussolini's fascist regime and a media regime, Mr. Eco says, is that "in fascist times, people knew that the newspapers and the radio were only communicating government press releases." In Italy today, political opponents are given airtime, Eco says, but they are never allowed to have the last word.
"A media regime does not need to send its opponents to jail. It silences them," he wrote in La Repubblica newspaper earlier this month.
