WADDICK DOYLE
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
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Title: Seducing the Republic: Berlusconi, narrative seduction, commercial television and political
power
And in this book of the memoirs of Casanova,
I found an illuminating idea: ’The man who desires
something, if he really desires it can even become king’".
’
Berlusconi: quoted in Panorama, 2 October, 1988:44
Italy in the 1980’s saw a transition from a national public television system with a
monopoly held by the RAI to a duopoly with the rise of a series of commercial television
networks in a cartel controlled by Silvio Berlusconi. Later, Berlusconi was to found a
political party and to become Prime Minister of Italy in 1994, six years after the above
statement. After some years in opposition, he has now been relelected with a
handsome majority and is again the Prime Minister and Berlusconi has been
nicknamed Il Gran Seduttore and he quotes the great seducer of history as his favorite
philosopher. What is the role of seduction in his success? How did little stories of
attraction help him in these moves? Put theoretically, in what sense did the stories on
his television stations become scripts for the success of his networks and eventually his
political career? Did it provide a script for performances in the public sphere or at least
a set of metaphors? As texts are they performative, do they produce effects or change
the way people view television or behave as political and linguistic subjects? How does
the organisation of of desire by stories travel across genres and spheres of the social
space?
Performance One
Airwaves were liberalized in 1976 as part of Constitutional Court decision concerning
the freedom of speech that led to a situation of total aregulation. The only requirement
was that private television stations be local. Berlusconi established a television station
in 1979 in Milan, which was transformed into a network, Canale 5 in 1981. As there
were no licenses or restrictions on opening stations, Italy had by I981 a third of the
television stations in the world. By 1985, 90% of this private television audience were
viewers of one of Berlusconi’s three networks.
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In 1981 Berlusconi needed to establish his network as national in order to obtain
advertising revenue. In Italy , national was virtually synonymous with public and
although the Constitutional Court had permitted broadcasting , it did not allow national
private broadcasting and hence refused private broadcasters national news or national
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Find reference
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Convention