ITALY: Italian television stations were embroiled in a controversy over censorship yesterday as media critics complained that coverage of Mr Silvio Berlusconi's gaffe in the European Parliament had been deliberately "softened and cut".
"We Italians live in a world apart. Just turn the television on and you'll see," the left-leaning Repubblica newspaper said in an editorial.
Rather than showing the "mad vulgarity" of the Prime Minister's concentration camp "joke" in parliament on Wednesday, news bulletins on state television and on Mr Berlusconi's three private channels had "hidden and censored" coverage, said the Repubblica editorial writer Curzio Maltese.
While coverage elsewhere in the world centred on Mr Berlusconi's offensive remarks, made as the Prime Minister took the helm of the European Presidency, news programmes in Italy presented the incident as a vicious attack by Mr Martin Schulz, leader of the German Socialists in the Strasbourg assembly, which provoked the jibe.
One evening news show on Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI) dubbed over the Prime Minister's voice as he delivered the joke that prompted uproar in the assembly and led to diplomatic protests from Berlin.
Having seen only TV reports of the "squabble" and a "small incident", the Repubblica editorial concluded: "The average Italian cannot understand why foreign ministries are on the move over such a trifle."
Amid growing controversy over state television coverage in general, directors of the three RAI channels have been summoned to explain themselves at a parliamentary commission on broadcasting standards next week.
In Italy, where the average person watches more than four hours of television a day, Mr Berlusconi runs three private Mediaset channels and indirectly controls RAI via his right-wing coalition's majority in the Italian parliament.
The unease follows months of complaints that Italian journalists are increasingly practising self-censorship, fearing they may lose their jobs if they are overcritical of the Prime Minister, Italy's richest man.
Cases of "improving" the news range from editing out "gaffes" made by the Prime Minister to airbrushing over his bald patch on the cover of Panorama, a weekly magazine.
"In Berlusconi's Italy, people don't know, they must not know, and so they cannot judge," wrote Repubblica.