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Ad Personam Man

‘Ad Personam’ is a term being bandied around frequently these days in Italy, often with reference to media mogul cum prime minister Silvio Berlusconi about his propensity for making laws which appear to benefit him personally.

A Cat’s Chance in Hell

If you were unaware, which you may be if you are not from Italy, most of the public TV stations here are influenced by Italy’s rag tag bunch of political masters. This means that the news is presented in such a way as to support the ruling junta. People are aware of this, especially Antonio […]

Zero Tolerance

I watched an interesting fly on the wall type documentary the other day entitled ‘Tolleranza Zero’ – ‘Zero Tolerance’ (Yes, at times Italian and English are extremely similar). This program was shown on La7, one of Italy’s public TV channels, and was about, as you might expect, how the Italian police are dealing with crime […]

Burnt Midnight Oil

A little while back I was asked to prepare a short two day workshop on how to write a press release in English for the Media Relations master at the business school where I often find myself. After burning copious amounts of that old midnight oil, I came up with such a course. The first […]

Berlusconi’s Advice

Mr Berlusconi, the man who would be Prime Minister of Italy (again), and one of Italy’s potentially top five sinners, dropped a slight clanger on prime time TV, yesterday, I think it was. In an interview he told a young worried female ‘precarious’ worker that she would be able to solve her financial worries by […]

Clever Son and Crafty Dog

My son continues to surprise us. For a 4.5 year old he has quite a devious mind. Just today after I had picked the light blighter up from school, we stopped off in a bar, or rather we were induced into entering the bat. I was with the mother of one of his friends, and […]

Sarkozy likes the BBC, possibly!

UPDATE: 14.01.08 – Having now read more of the articles in Il Sole, I can now understand why the paper used the headline saying that ‘State TV without advertising would not work’.  The article basically argues that just about all TV and Internet, is only possible due to advertising.   Whilst this is partially true, I […]

Italian TV, one more time…

Well, I’ve gone on about it before, Italian TV that is, and how low the overall quality of programming is. Another of my Italian TV related gripes concerned the inordinate amount of advertising viewers are blessed with. Some time back, both of the biggies, RAI and Mediaset, were fined over the overuse of advertising. Not […]

Levi-Prodi blog gaggers extraordinaire

Yes, I was a bit slow on the uptake re the Levi Prodi attempts to censor bloggers attempts to tell it how it is with regard to the situation in Italy. But I am not all that surprised that there was something of a time lag between the information getting out and ending up in […]