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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2016
Many Italian institutions deteriorated in the 1980s as the struggle to consolidate and extend party influence led to the spoils system (lottizzazione) becoming the norm throughout virtually the whole of the public sector. Yet perhaps none was more affected than the public broadcasting company RAI. Once an organization with a strong corporate identity and sense of mission, it lost its sense of purpose as it faced the unprecedented challenge of competition from an unregulated private sector and simultaneously became a resource in the unceasing battle for position between parties and factions. By the early 1990s RAI's credibility had declined dramatically, it was riddled with debts, it lacked a strategy, and it was faring badly in the ratings. Yet the full extent of its crisis was revealed only with the collapse of the parties that had for so long ‘protected’ it from serious scrutiny and genuine public accountability.
1 See Gundle, Stephen, ‘L'americanizzazione del quotidiano: televisione e consumismo nell'Italia degli anni Cinquanta’, Quaderni storici, XXI, 62, 1986, pp. 561–94.Google Scholar
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7 Interview, 20 September 1994.Google Scholar
8 Interview, 20 September 1994.Google Scholar
9 Demattè interview.Google Scholar
10 Murialdi interview.Google Scholar
11 Murialdi, Paolo, Maledetti ‘professori’: diario di un anno alla Rai, Rizzoli, Milan, 1994, p. 67.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., p. 137.Google Scholar
13 For a defence of the record of RAI-3 news, see Curzi, Sandro and Mineo, Corradino, Giü le mani dalla TV, Sperling and Kupfer, Milan, 1994.Google Scholar
14 Demattè interview.Google Scholar
15 Murialdi reports that Pasquarelli, Gianni, RAI director-general until 1992, told him that lottizzazione was ‘in the blood’ of RAI. ‘I fear it is true’, was his diary annotation. See Murialdi, , Maledetti ‘professori’, p. 11.Google Scholar
16 See Ruggeri, Giovanni and Guarini, Mario, Berlusconi: inchiesta sul signor TV, Riuniti, Rome, 1987, chapter 9, pp. 85–108.Google Scholar
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18 Demattè interview.Google Scholar
19 Berlusconi had a brief conversation with Demattè and the director general Locatelli on 10 June 1994 when he arrived at Saxa Rubra to record the Prime Minister's traditional address to the country prior to the European elections. Murialdi was informed of the conversation and wrote in his diary that ‘the first cards he would like to receive, we think, are Deaglio's head and softer news broadcasts’, Maledetti ‘professori’, p. 155.Google Scholar
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23 Demattè told us that he was perfectly prepared to stay but that for other board members it had become ‘unbearable to be in the firing line’.Google Scholar
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25 Murialdi said that the term ‘professors’ was used to imply that the board members were ‘respectable, but incompetent’.Google Scholar