OSCE media watchdog says new Italian legislation insufficient to curb media concentration

VIENNA, 7 June 2005 - OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti said on Tuesday that new Italian media legislation introduced in 2004 had not significantly altered the unusually high concentration of ownership in the country's television industry.
"A year after the adoption of the Gasparri Law, I have not found any significant change in the unusually high concentration in the Italian TV market," he said, presenting a new report on pluralism in Italian television. "The publicly owned RAI and the privately owned Mediaset continue to control over 90 percent of all television revenues and audiences."
"The RAI-Mediaset duopoly has deprived the Italian audiences of an effective variety of sources of information and has thereby weakened the guarantees of pluralism. It has become politically aggravated by the fact that Prime Minister Berlusconi's family holding Fininvest is a major shareholder in Mediaset," Haraszti added.
The report was presented one year after the adoption of the Gasparri Law, Italy's first comprehensive regulation of all broadcast media, and the Frattini Law on the conflicts between public duty and private interests of officials.
The Gasparri Law was intended to increase competition in the TV market by fully switching Italy from analogue to digital terrestrial transmission (DTT).
The report said the law would undoubtedly encourage the creation of many new broadcasting channels.
Thanks to digitalisation, private broadcasting had ceased to be a concession by the State in Italy and was becoming more of an ordinary entrepreneurial business, just like newspaper publishing.
"That is a major step for the broadcast media on their way to true independence," Haraszti said. "However, despite its pioneering features and its modernising effect on the media market, the Gasparri Law will not be able to remedy the 'Italian anomaly' and de-monopolise television any time soon."
Instead of dealing directly with the present-day high concentrations, the law aims to achieve de-monopolisation indirectly, as a by-product of technological development in the distant future, when today's television markets will have developed in ways which no-one can predict today.
"The new law is likely to reproduce rather than eliminate the high concentration in television and the domination of RAI by politics," it said.
The report said Italy's comprehensive digital-era media legislation needed to be reviewed to correct provisions which maintain the present domination of television by two groups.
The issue of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's public office and his media holdings may have been settled in legal terms by the Frattini Law, but it remained a source of concern from the point of view of the quality of democracy as the chosen legal formula did not fully distance the Prime Minister from his media holdings.
"OSCE commitments oblige governments to proactively safeguard media pluralism," said the Representative on Freedom of the Media. "Conflicts of interest in the media need specific measures to strengthen public confidence in the fairness and transparency of political competition and government accountability."
The full report is available here:
www.osce.org/fom