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Overview
Cinzia Padovani takes an in-depth look at Italian public service broadcasting, covering its history, its role in Italian society, its relationship to the political party system, and its influence on cultural and linguistic unification in Italy. Tracing the history and development of Italian public television broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) to the present, Padovani challenges traditional views by asserting that parties' 'interference' in RAI has, at times, strengthened the role of public service broadcasting and that partisan journalism has even enhanced democratic potential.
Synopsis
Cinzia Padovani takes an in-depth look at Italian public service broadcasting, covering its history, its role in Italian society, its relationship to the political party system, and its influence on cultural and linguistic unification in Italy.
Editorials
Choice
Offering a thorough, well-documented examination of the nexus between Italian politics and public television over the past 60 years, Padovani concludes that government involvement in the television system may have in some ways improved the public service role of state-owned television broadcasting. She explains how a political quota system served to stabilize the system in an ironic sort of way. Detailed and current (the author includes many mentions of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his party, and his private media holdings), the book is undoubtedly the most thorough examination of the topic available in English. Highly recommended.Journal Of International Communication
A Fatal Attraction proves to be a useful and resourceful book for scholars of Italian politics and media culture, but also for readers interested in studying examples of public media that challenge and deviate from the dominant Anglo-Saxon model of political independence.— Michela Ardizzoni, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Political Communication
The book is very rich and extremely very well documented....Padovani’s book is a very good starting point for a discussion on pluralism on the media and the different ways to practice it and to enrich it making a better democratic life possible giving all the different parts of the society the same rights of expression.— Paolo Mancini