Italy wishes more television pluralism and, especially, sanear the finance of the public television.

To the beginning of his electoral campaign, Romano Prodi showed that «the first chain of the RAI must continue like public ownership, but the second one must be released to investors and private thifty persons». When the coalition was created, the parties of the left wing, especially Communist Refoundation, they were opposed to the minimal privatization of the state monster - that provided in his third chain a free shop window to the left parties - but they ended up by yielding to the majority criterion in the coalition that consists of a partial privatization of the RAI.

Piero Fassino, leader of the party of the Democrats of Left, the biggest in the coalition of Romano Prodi, has moved forward that the "reform" of the television system will affect in way parallel to both protagonists of the duopoly. Mediaset, which has three national chains-Tele5, Rete4 and Italia1 - is in an irregular situation, since Rete4 it has occupied improperly for many years a frequency that belongs to another company, Europa7.

In turn, the RAI, which is provided the same way with three national chains, lives in the strange situation to be financed by the «canon of antenna» for 99 euros per year that every proprietary Italian of a TV set must pay and, at the same time, with his income for publicity, what he leads to the criticized situation of double financing and competition disloyal to the rest of the sector. Seen the anomaly, the Government Berlusconi had started a partial privatization of 30 per cent of the capital of the RAI, but the project got lost in the running sands of the end of the term.

According to Piero Fassino, chief of the principal party of the coalition of Prodi, the new Government will have to the Rete4 of Mediaset to evict finally the busy frequency and happen to transmit for satellite. At the same time, he proposes to privatize the second chain of the RAI, which will happen to be financed by publicity, while the first one - purely national - and the third one - fundamentally of regional and local information - will be continued by them like public service financed with the already mentioned one «canon of antenna».

The steps already given by the Government Berlusconi, which established the Holding RAI and carried out the countable separation between income of canon and advertizing income, will facilitate to the Government Prodi the continuation of the project, but otherwise: instead of privatizing 30 per cent of the "holding", it will privatize completely RAI2 preserving others two chains as public service.

The step needs to modify in the Parliament the called law Gasparri, which has remained completely obsolete in a very little time due to the technological changes and to the difficulty to apply concepts as the invoicing of the «integrated system of the communications» - fundamental to value the domineering positions - that the Government never went so far as to calculate even.


(04/05/06)