Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: Come ci giudica il NYT

June 7, 2009
In Italy, Questions Are From Enemies, and That's That
By RACHEL DONADIO
ROME - I got a call last week from an Italian friend, an investigative 
reporter. He had just spoken to an Italian magistrate who wanted to sound 
out a theory.
The magistrate wondered - in all seriousness - if my recent article in The 
New York Times about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's personal life could 
be evidence that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, envious of Mr. Berlusconi's 
media empire, was using me to take down the prime minister.
My friend quickly and rightly dismissed the theory for what it was: insane. 
But the fact that it had been advanced by a respectable magistrate tells you 
almost everything you need to know about how power operates in Italy. It 
also goes a long way toward explaining the unstoppable success of Mr. 
Berlusconi, a phenomenon as alien to Americans as conflict-of-interest laws 
are to Italians.
Americans are forever asking how Italy can keep voting for Mr. Berlusconi, 
whose legal problems - not to mention his wife's recent threats of divorce 
and accusations about her husband's dalliances with very young women - would 
have toppled governments elsewhere.
But Italians don't always see things this way. In Italy, abuse of office is 
something of a foreign concept, even though an Italian court is now 
investigating whether Mr. Berlusconi committed it when he used government 
planes to shuttle guests, including a Neapolitan singer and a flamenco 
dancer, to gala parties at his villa in Sardinia.
Mr. Berlusconi has brushed this off, as he has all other claims of 
impropriety, as a campaign against him by left-wing magistrates and 
journalists. He says they want to discredit his center-right coalition ahead 
of this weekend's elections for the European Parliament, which he is still 
expected to win.
While wildly off target in my case, the magistrate's Bloomberg theory is not 
entirely crazy. Mr. Berlusconi last week suggested in an interview that The 
Times of London had published critical editorials about him because it is 
owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Sky is the largest player in the Italian 
cable television market after Mr. Berlusconi.
In Italy, this is seen as business as usual. The general understanding is 
that everyone uses the means at his disposal to fight his rivals.
The real issue here is that Italy is not a meritocracy. It is a highly 
evolved feudal society in which everyone is seen as - and inevitably is - 
the product of a system, or a patron.
During the postwar years, the American-backed Christian Democrats, 
Moscow-backed Communists and business-minded Socialists had their own 
networks of politicians, bankers, lawyers - and their own press organs. That 
corrupt patronage system collapsed with the end of the cold war and a huge 
bribery scandal.
Today, there is no ideology and no network; there is only Mr. Berlusconi, 
and you are either with him or against him. Compared to the old order, Mr. 
Berlusconi's political class is seen as a modernizing force. Mr. Berlusconi's 
rivals accuse him of being on the wrong side of the law, and he in turn 
accuses them of being on the wrong side of history. Those two things shouldn't 
cancel each other out, but often do.
The members of the Italian left have been infighting since the collapse of 
the Berlin Wall and are so weak and ineffective today that some in this land 
of byzantine conspiracy theories believe that Mr. Berlusconi must be paying 
them off.
Italy is deeply confusing for Americans, who are steeped in notions of 
speaking truth to power and following the money, raised in the country of 
"Yes we can," not "Sorry, Signora, that's impossible."
In the topsy-turvy logic of Italy, Mr. Berlusconi's unrivalled grip on the 
public and private sectors and media outlets doesn't make him seem 
compromised. Instead, his supporters see him as rich enough to be 
independent. As one working-class Roman told me not long ago, full of 
admiration, "he's so rich, he didn't even need to go into politics."
In Italy, when journalists ask completely legitimate questions about the 
legal status and personal life of the leader of a Group of Eight country - 
or even when they ask why Italy doesn't seem to care about the answers - 
they are inevitably accused of insulting the prime minister or of being the 
pawns of larger interests.
In Italy, the general assumption is that someone is guilty until proven 
innocent. Trials - in the press and in the courts - are more often about 
defending personal honor than establishing facts, which are easily 
manipulated.
Sometimes I wonder what Pope Benedict XVI, who has railed against the 
"dictatorship of relativism," in which equating all beliefs leads to 
nihilism, would make of Italy. Here, information is used less to clarify 
than to obfuscate.
How else to interpret the barrage of wildly contradictory material that has 
emerged in the press in recent weeks about how Mr. Berlusconi met Noemi 
Letizia, whose 18th birthday party he attended in April - an act that so 
angered his long-estranged wife that in threatening divorce she became de 
facto opposition leader?
In the absence of a clear, coherent story, the only standard of evidence 
becomes personal loyalty.
Ms. Letizia said in an interview last week that she was upset that her new 
boyfriend had auditioned for the reality television show "Big Brother" 
without asking her permission.
In the reality show that is today's Italy, Mr. Berlusconi is the clear 
winner. His rivals are doing little more than throwing tomatoes on stage. 
The actor is showing signs of fatigue, but the audience is glued to its 
seats. Apr�s lui, le d�luge.



But Italians don't always see things this way.
Indubbiamente. Basta leggere quello che scrivono qui diversi
"italiani".
Ora visto che anche alla sedicente opposizione PDina il conflitto
d'interessi sembra non interessare molto (� il conflitto dei
disinteressi?) e il resto di cui si parla nell'articolo � gossip che
pu� far perdere voti (come se ci fosse bisogno d'altro, dopo i
disastri dei lider minimi, dei pane e cicoria e delle scamorze), le
uniche speranze stanno in una nuova non-sedicente opposizione e
nell'isolamento in cui, spero, il nostro Sultano verr� messo dai suoi
omologhi stranieri con un po' di sale in zucca .
Mentor