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overview
holdings
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overview
This profile considers the media holdings of Silvio Berlusconi,
Italian politician, and his family.
It covers -
introduction
Ownership of Italy's mass media
is even more concentrated
than that of Canada and Australia.
Companies controlled by the family of Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi dominate Italian commercial television
(with a 45% audience share and over 60% of total advertising
sales), have a major presence in advertising and publishing,
and have been moving into telecommunications, despite
recurrent allegations of of impropriety.
Alexander Stille's 2006 The Sack of Rome offered
an analogy for US readers -
Imagine that Silvio Berlusconi were Bill Gates. Aside
from being the richest man in the United States, Gates
would own or control all but one of our TV networks,
along with Time Warner, HBO, Aetna, Fidelity, The Los
Angeles Times, and the New York Yankees. And he
would have been our president and commanded a majority
in Congress, until barely losing an election
the group
The family has beneficial ownership of around 96% of the
Fininvest holding company. Fininvest has a 34% controlling
stake (down from 50.7% in 2005) in Mediaset,
the terrestrial television group that competes with state-owned
RAI and operates three networks: Canale 5, Italia 1 and
Retequattro.
Dominance of the airwaves is of particular interest given
low newspaper readership figures: Pippa Norris' insightful
A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial
Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000)
for example notes suggestions that 82% of Italians depend
only on television for news, the highest percentage in
the EU.
Fininvest also has a controlling stake in Mondadori, Italy’s
largest book and magazine publishing group (with 30% and
38% of the domestic market respectively). Mondadori's
magazine arm encompasses over 50 titles. In June 2006
Mondadori announced that it would pay €550 million
for Emap France, the ailing French magazine arm (including
Le Film Francais and the Tele Star
and Tele Poche television guides) of UK-based
EMAP. In May 2007 Mediaset, John
de Mol and Goldman Sachs announced that they would pay
US$3.56bn for Telefonica's
75% in Endemol NV, the global producer of tat such as
Big Brother.
Fininvest controls Il Giornale, a leading national
newspaper that competes with L'Espresso's
La Repubblica and with La Stampa and Corriere
della Sera of the RCS group.
It has a 36% stake in financial-services group Mediolanum.
Other holdings include property, multimedia, printing
and telephone directories.
Cross-holdings, nominee companies and other devices inhibit
a clear picture of the group. There have been recurrent
moves to force Berlusconi to divest some of his media
assets - and he has made undertakings to that effect -
but there is apparently little action. Indeed, at the
end of 2001 he moved
to acquire additional print and radio operations from
the Il Sole 24 Ore group.
On 19 January 2002 the Economist commented that
Mr
Berlusconi has yet to remove the ubiquitous conflicts
between his private and public concerns. Because his
companies are embroiled in almost every part of the
economy, his failure to do so casts doubts on the motives
behind so many of his projects, whatever their merits.
In
December 2004 an Italian court found that a charge of
paying a US$430,000 bribe to a judge was proved; Berlusconi
escaped conviction because more than the statutory limit
of seven and a half years had elapsed since the charges
were filed.
structure and evolution
An indication of the Berlusconi family's holdings is here.
A chronology of the group is here.
the man
Silvio Berlusconi was born in 1936, apparently in
comfortable circumstances. Friends and foes have been
quick to mythologise his career - he supposedly charged
entrance fees for puppet shows at primary school, was
a ghost-writer for high school essays and of course sold
vacuum cleaners to pay for his law degree at the University
of Milan. His thesis was on The Newspaper Advertising
Contract.
Belusconi moved in the right circles at university (future
prime minister Bettino Craxi was a friend) and made a
small fortune from 1962 onwards using a property and construction
company named Edilnord, notably through residential development
such as Milano 2 in 1969. That generated allegations that
he'd benefited from favourable rulings by local politicians
and had ties to the shadowy Propaganda 2 (P2) group.
In 1974 he founded cable television station Telemilano
to service Milano 2 and in 1978 worked his way around
rules that gave RAI the national broadcast monopoly: his
local stations simultaneously broadcast the same programs.
Fininvest was founded in 1975 as a holding company. He
established Canale 5 (Channel 5) in 1980, a big hit with
a schedule of local game shows and US treats such as Dallas.
At the same time he established the Publitalia 80 advertising
agency, one of the largest in Europe by the mid-1980's,
and acquired the other two major commercial television
stations - Retequattro (1984) and Italia Uno (1983).
Fininvest moved into newspaper and magazine publishing
(eg the weekly Panorama), books (the venerable
Mondadori group in 1985), retailing, direct marketing,
online services, cinemas (1985) and sport (the AC Milan
soccer team).
That expansion reflected past moves by other families
(for example the Agnellis) but was more rapid and generated
a new epithet - 'Berlusconism' - to describe a way of
life in which people lived in houses built by Berlusoni,
watched television controlled by Berlusconi, shopped at
supermarkets owned by Berlusconi, ate in restaurants built
by Berlusconi, and relaxed on Belusconi tennis courts
or watching his soccer team. Investment outside Italy
- eg in Spain, in France (with Seydoux
and Hersant) and Germany (with
Kirch) - was less successful.
In 1984 prime minister Craxi's 'Berlusconi Decree' overturned
a court order banning Berlusconi from broadcasting. That
support was reflected in the 1990 Legge Mammi that
implicitly created a Berlusconi/RAI duopoly.
Apparently underwhelmed by Australian-style attempts to
limit ownership to either broadcast or print, Berlusconi
appointed his brother as editor of Il Giornale
and shrugged off litigation during the Tagentopoli ("Bribesville")
investigations of 1992-94.
Proceedings relating to alleged tax fraud, accounting
peculiarities and bribery of police and judges continued.
In April 2001 the Economist alleged that he'd paid
23 billion lire into Craxi’s offshore bank accounts.
As of 31 July 2003 the Economist - claiming that
he had "tried to put himself beyond the reach of
the law" - was pressing
Berlusconi for answers; the media czar (and then president
of the European Union's Council of Ministers) was continuing
defamation action against the UK publication over the
2001 article. Readers of this site should conduct appropriate
research before making their own judgements about circumstances,
claims and counter-claims.
In 1993 Berlusconi formed the populist Forza
Italia party on the theme of "good government" and
the "politics of efficiency". Forza Italia became the
largest bloc in the national parliament at the March 1994
elections, with Belusconi as PM in coalition with the
neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and the Northern League.
Insights are offered by Jonathan Hopkin's 2004 New
Parties in Government in Italy: Comparing Lega Nord and
Forza Italia (PDF).
Berlusconi resigned in December 1994.
In July 1995 he sold a 20% stake in Mediaset to German
Kirchmedia and others for US$1.1
billion, subsequently taking his stake to under 50% through
a public flotation and selling a further 16.7% for €2
billion in April 2005.
He again became PM in the 2001 election (Alexander Stille's
NYRB comment is here)
and subsequently extended his broadcast holdings. He was
defeated in the 2006 election. In 2007 Berlusconi formed
the People of Freedom party (PDL), absorbing National
Alliance. In April 2008 he became Prime Minister, with
PDL and ally the Northern League (under Umberto Bossi)
gaining a majority of seats in the national election.
studies
Prior to 2004, which saw publication of Paul Ginsborg's
perceptive Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power &
Patrimony (London: Verso 2004) and David Lane's Berlusconi's
Shadow: Crime, Justice and the Pursuit of Power (London:
Allen Lane 2004), there was no major English-language
study of Berlusconi or Fininvest. They have been supplemented
by Alexander Stille's The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful
European Country With a Fabled History and a Storied Culture
Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (New
York: Penguin 2006).
Marco Travaglio's L'odore dei soldi (Rome: Editori
Riuniti 2001), reviewed here,
endorses the Economist's claim that the empire's
smell is not very sweet. Other Italian treatments include
Paolo Labini's Berlusconi e gli anticorpi: Diario
di un cittadino indignato (Bari: Laterza 2003), Giorio
Bocca's Piccolo Cesare (Milan: Feltrinelli 2002),
Giuseppe Fiori's Il venditore: Storia di silvio berlusconi
e della fininvest (Milan: Garzanti 1996), Franco
Cordero's Le strane regole del Signor B (Milan:
Garzanti 2003) and Giovani Sartori's Mala tempora
(Bari: Laterza 2004).
Giovanni Bechelloni's 'The Journalist as Political Client
in Italy' in Newspapers & Democracy (Cambridge:
MIT Press 1980) edited by Anthony Smith and Political
Clientalism & the Media: Southern Europe & Latin
America in Comparative Perspective (PDF)
by Daniel Hallin & Stylianos Papathanassopoulos offer
a perspective. That is consistent with Gianpietro's 'Media
Moguls in Italy' in Media Moguls (London: Routledge
1991) edited by Jeremy Tunstall and Ginsborg's Italy
and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State 1980-2000
(London: Allen Lane 2001).
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