Italy is widely acknowledged to be a more than usually special case in the matter of media's relationship with politics. It is clear why. The dominant political actor of the past 15 years has been and remains Silvio Berlusconi – who has built up a major business, Fininvest. This comprises Mediaset, which now has three major TV channels; Italy’s largest publisher, Mondadori; Italy’s largest advertising agency Publitalia; a premier league football club, AC Milan; an insurance company, Mediolanum; and a bank, Mediobanca.

This formidable apparatus of media, finance  and popular culture has been his to command on the three occasions when Berlusconi has governed the country as Prime Minister. He inherited the practice, enjoyed by all in his position, of appointing a majority of his supporters to the board of Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), the public broadcaster, and of placing journalists favourable to him in the news divisions of the company’s three main channels.

This is a unique situation in a major democratic state. Its effects have been dramatised by the 2009 decision of the leading institute for the promotion of democracy, Freedom House, to downgrade Italy from having a “free” press to one “partly free”.

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The Axess Project on Italian Media aims to do three things:

First, to produce an analysis of the main changes that Berlusconi has introduced in the Italian media scene, particularly in television. This would include:

• the programmes his TV channels introduced that were new to Italy;
• the adaptations he made to existing Italian TV and cultural formats  and the impact they had on Italian customs;
• the style of news he introduced, and its development over the past three decades;
• the effect on the public broadcaster, RAI;
• how the legal and business framework of the Italian media changed;
• the impact Berlusconi’s business and political careers had on the press, on journalists’ ethos and on the role of investigative journalism.

Second, to tease out the effect his media power has had on his political power. This will include an assessment of:

• how far his political party (then Forza Italia), and career in politics, were conceived and launched with the aid of his media and of public relations;
• how he has brought into politics people from his media empire;
• how far the entertainment and drama of his channels chimed with the messages of his political campaigns;
• how far, if at all, his news and current affairs programmes – including chat shows – were overtly or otherwise in support of his party and governments;
• how far his control of RAI differed from that of other governments when in power;
• how much substance there is in his belief that most journalists are of the left, and are against him.
• the efforts of the left to address the “conflict of interest” between his media and political power.

Third, to assess how far the Berlusconi alliance of media and political power is unique to Italy, how and in what forms it exists elsewhere and  how far it is, in some forms, exportable. The assessment would include a consideration of:

• the increased dominance of entertainment and sport in TV schedules;
• the decreasing amount of documentary and analytical programmes;
• the ever-greater disengagement of the public from traditional political institutions – as voting, political party membership and allegiance;
• the unresolved question of whether other media tycoons may decide and would be allowed to enter politics;
• the presentation of political leaders as media events in themselves and the increasing importance of the role of emotions in politics;
• the development of a business-like approach to running a country (promoting and achieving economic success, beating competition, using the media for publicity);
• the development of a rhetoric of being an “outsider” in politics, used to distinguish himself from professional politicians even 15 years after his first election as an MP.

Silvio Berlusconi is a polarising figure, in his own country and beyond: another reason for ensuring that our research be as objective and fair as possible in its judgments and its marshalling of evidence. This assessment, from outside of Italy, will remain independent of the main sides in the battle and will produce a piece of work which will aim to be a future reference point.