Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire plays down call girl claims

If Silvio Berlusconi were to resign as Italian Prime Minister tomorrow the majority of Italians who get their news solely from television would have little or no idea why. Mr Berlusconi owns Italy’s three main commercial TV channels and they have played down or ignored the recent scandals surrounding his private life. Even this week’s claims that Patrizia D’Addario, an escort girl, spent the US election night with him at his Rome residence in November has gone almost unmentioned. More surprising perhaps is the behaviour of RAI, the state broadcaster. When Ms D’Addario told Corriere della Sera last week that she had had given prosecutors audio and video evidence of her night with the Prime Minister, RAI reported Mr Berlusconi’s attack on “rubbish and falsehoods”, but made only the vaguest of references to “parties involving girls”. TG1, the main RAI news service, has since either ignored the daily torrent of revelations or placed them low in the running order, emphasising the denials by Mr Berlusconi and Giampaolo Tarantini, the Bari businessman under investigation for allegedly “abetting prostitution”. As a result, Paolo Garimberti, the head of RAI, is now at loggerheads with Augusto Minzolini, the TGI news editor. Garimberti has criticised his own service for failing to give viewers the “complete and transparent information” required of a publicly owned broadcaster and has been twice rebuked by Minzolini, who went in front of the cameras this week saying that RAI would not give prominence to stories that “lack evidence.” Minzolini, 51, a former reporter on Panorama magazine (which Mr Berlusconi also owns), told viewers that TG1 had taken a prudent position on the gossip over the private homes of Mr Berlusconi because “in this story full of allusions, more or less reliable witnesses and personal rancour, there is still no sure news, nor any evidence that a crime has been committed involving the premier or his aides”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6572261.ece