From `historic compromise' to `telecratic compromise': notes for a history of political communication in Italy between the First and Second Republic

Abstract

The author analyses the development of the mass communication system in Italy during the 1990s. The central thesis is that television's hegemony over political communication has profoundly transformed Italian politics. The mass political parties have been marginalized and their representative structure has lost its traditional significance. The new subjects of politics no longer belong properly speaking to parties: they are the elites belonging to electoral machines which, via television, offer the mass of citizen-consumers their own symbolic products, engaging in publicity battles according to precise marketing strategies. At the normative level Parliament and the government have systematically legalized the existing public-private duopoly in the media sector and today a new constitutional paradigm appears on the horizon, that of the `telecratic compromise'. On one side is a party system based on control of the three channels of public television (RAI) and on the other the private market monopoly of Fininvest owned by the multimedia manager and political leader Silvio Berlusconi.