De Benedetti Takes Aim At Berlusconi At Oxford University Speech While Murdoch’s Sky Italia Nips Away At Mediaset’s Digital Dominance

Philip Stone November 25, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Carlo de Benedetti chose the very public foreign forum of an Oxford University lecture to let Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have It, verbally speaking, right between the eyes while at home Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia, after announcing it will launch a free digital terrestrial station in December, is distributing a USB key that will allow Sky desktops to access Mediaset’s free digital terrestrial channels – and without those Sky subscribers having a Mediaset desktop how can it sell its pay platforms?

Our headline of a few weeks ago  is still very much true, “Remember That Old Saying, “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even” – Well, Watch Murdoch and De Benedetti Do Just That To Their Joint Foe Berlusconi” except now it is happening with a real vengeance.

de Benedetti, chairman of Italy’s Gruppo Editoriale L’Expresso, was the invited lecturer at the Oxford University Reuters Memorial Lecture where he combined two speeches – an impassioned explanation of why newspapers are so important to ensure democracy (on which we will have much more Thursday) and the second a no-holds barred attack on his old foe Berlusconi. The de Benedetti-Berlusconi feud dates back to the 1990s when the two media titans locked horns over who would get a controlling interest in the Mondadori publishing house that today is Italy’s largest publisher of consumer magazines.  Berlusconi’s Finninvest won and de Benedetti’s CIR lost, but de Benedetti did come away with his Expresso Group. Sixteen years later, in 2007, a court ruled that Berlusconi’s lawyer, Cesare Previti, had bribed the Mondadori judge although Berlusconi himself was cleared. de Benedetti’s CIR then sued, winning a €750 million ($1.1 billion, £700 million) judgment that Finninvest said was “unjust” and it is appealing.    

Berlusconi has problems on at least three fronts – his alleged sexual dalliances, including with Naomi Letiza, a young lady who refers to him as papi and everyone is asking “why” while another lady has talked about naughty parties Berlusconi has hosted and Tuesday she published her memoirs – just what he needed -- and all of this is spread daily all over the non-Berlusconi media with, yes, de Benedetti’s La Repubblica leading the charge. Little wonder that Berlusconi’s long-suffering wife has thrown in the towel, demanding a divorce and a large chunk of his Empire. On the criminal legal front the courts have thrown out laws that Berlusconi got passed that would have shielded him from various trials about past business practices, so now he will be spending a lot of time in court sitting at the defense table while at the same time trying to govern. And with his Mediaset TV business it’s just about as close as companies can get to all-out warfare with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia taking the offensive, sticking its  fingers into the digital terrestrial business that Berlusconi basically figured was his – a war that Berlusconi had reignited by doubling the VAT (sales tax) on satellite broadcast subscriptions. 

La Repubblica has been leading the charge in trying to get Berlusconi to talk, especially about the sexual innuendoes.  The newspaper has posed 10 questions –seven on the sex allegations, two about his ability to govern and the last, given several utterances by Berlusconi over the past months as the pressure builds, “In light of what has emerged in the last two months, what, Mr. Prime Minister, is your state of health”? Berlusconi has refused to directly answer and the newspaper, on its web site, has a running clock of how long the questions have been posed and unanswered – as this was written it was 194 days, 16 hours, five minutes and four seconds!

So with all of this as background here is some of de Benedetti’s attack on his prime minister while on foreign soil at Oxford: “The Prime Minister has in fact attacked the papers that have dealt with his scandal, especially during an official meeting of young entrepreneurs at Santa Margherita Ligure where he asked companies not to advertise in papers which he defined as ‘doom and gloom merchants’, explaining later that he was referring specifically to Repubblica. This is the first time, as has been noted, that a western political leader has tried to put economic pressure on a paper which has been criticizing him with a view to weakening it, thus interfering with the free market.

“That same political leader then publicly invited the business people to boycott (‘you must rebel against Repubblica’, were his actual words), and described two journalists of the paper who asked him a question as ‘criminals’. He also told the correspondent of the Spanish paper Pais in Italy that he hoped his paper would go bankrupt, because he had asked him about the scandal. He has also advised Italians not to read the papers, explaining that there is good information only on television, while that of the newspapers is bad information. Lastly, the Premier has taken legal action against Repubblica’s ten questions, requesting damages of one million euro: this is another first, never had it happened before - a Prime Minister taking legal action against questions that he wants the judge to cancel and get rid of.”

So, no love loss there. And it goes on: “The Prime Minister in attacking is attacking the whole of the press of the western world, accusing it of being part of a subversive plot to overturn his government, as if there were some kind of information international. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether it is still possible in Europe to carry out ongoing investigative journalism on those in power or not. And under what conditions it is possible to do such work…

“Never before has it happened in the western world that a Prime Minister has used television channels and newspapers under his control or ownership to attack on a personal level – not at the level of ideas or opinions -- anyone who criticizes him or expresses opinions that are out of line. In Italy this is what has been happening in the last few months and the editor of the bishops’ newspaper knows something about it because after he had criticized those in power an anonymous statement was published accusing him in police-style language of homosexuality. He was forced to resign from his position.

“The question of freedom of the press, in a democracy in the heart of Europe in 2009, must therefore be reformulated in these terms: can intimidation, attacks, court action and insults condition the free exercise of journalistic criticism, or even merely the investigation and enquiry work? Can they be allowed to interfere with the serenity of a journalist’s work, with his or her freedom of expression? Is there anyone who, on switching on their computer to write a critical article about those in power, first thinks about themselves, their personal life, any possible weaknesses they may have, any fears and then thinks it’s better to keep well away, avoid problems, better not to bother? Does all this reflect or not on the right of the citizen to be freely informed, i.e. on his or her right to know about things, meaning to be able to take part in the normal physiological confrontation between press and those in power, in total freedom and independence on both sides?”

And he warned, “In Italy in the last few days the papers have a new case in front of them: the Prime Minister is designing a law which, by reducing the time required for trials, will cancel two of his own trials currently in progress in Milan, using a format which is a western anomaly that we could define as follows: the executive using the legislative to stop the judicial.” That de Benedetti would choose such a prestigious foreign lecture platform to go after Berlusconi in such a manner shows the depth of his feelings, and no doubt his hosts understood that in inviting him.

Back at home, meanwhile, Berlusconi, honored Tuesday by Italy’s version of Rolling Stone Magazine as 2009 Rock Star of the Year because his lifestyle would put rock and roll artists to shame, is facing challenges on the terrestrial television front by Murdoch’s Sky Italia. Sky, having already won a court battle that Mediaset must accept Sky advertising – Mediaset said it did run Sky ads, but Sky said it wouldn’t run as many as it wanted  -- then announced it was going to start up in December its own terrestrial digital channel called Cielo, Italian for, you guessed it, Sky.

And then turning the screws a bit more Sky announced it was giving to its subscribers a USB key permitting them to use the Sky desktop box to access free digital terrestrial TV. Mediaset went cuckoo over that and filed an antitrust suit against Sky who promptly asked the antitrust authority to throw out the suit saying its USB key was “a market response to a competitive situation.”

This may be winter, but it’s getting decidedly warm for Berlusconi. His political coalition is bickering and even though his personal popularity is down because of the alleged sex scandals it is still far higher than for most other European leaders and there is talk he might call for elections. Meantime there’s the divorce -- his wife wants a court hearing where a lot of dirty laundry will get washed in public while he wants a quiet financial settlement but she is now asking for more than he wants to give. His criminal legal battles are only getting worse which is why, as de Benedetti noted , the prime minister is trying to pass laws restricting the time it takes to bring criminal charges and that would get him out of two current cases. His media battles with Murdoch are beginning to really bite not only on the Sky front but also with Murdoch newspapers around the world -- particularly the august Times of London – taking every possibility to continually skewer Murdoch’s Public Enemy Number One.

It just can’t be as much fun as it used to be!