A fresh pre-election row erupted on Wednesday after Premier Silvio Berlusconi announced an impromptu appearance on his private TV network Mediaset.
Berlusconi subsequently backed down from the unscheduled interview on the Wednesday night show Terra after an avalanche of protests from his critics and an official note from the TV regulating authority stating that the appearance would be breaking the rules regulating pre-election campaigning on TV.
The centre-left opposition slammed the planned lone guest appearance just four days before Italy's general elections as a violation of the country's electoral laws. Opposition chief Romano Prodi said that "this would be a very serious breach of a State law... The laws are there to be respected".
The premier countered that Prodi and other opposition heavyweights had refused an invitation to appear on the same show and that the presence of left-wing journalists would provide the necessary guarantee of political balance. "The Left's strategy has stopped me appearing on any television shows right in the heart of the election campaign," complained the billionaire media magnate.
He also said that Italy's Broadcasting Communications Authority had approved the interview. The watchdog immediately issued a statement contradicting the premier, saying that no permission was or could have been given for such an appearance.
It stressed that "the guiding principle (during election campaigns) for such programmes is that a balanced presence of political representatives must be guaranteed.". It also issued a fresh reminder to broadcasters to stick to the rules.
The Authority has just fined Mediaset 250,000 euros for bias in favour of Berlusconi in its news and political coverage during the election campaign. It is the fourth time this year that Mediaset, owned by Berlusconi's family holding company Fininvest, has been fined for a lack of balance in its news coverage. Meanwhile, the controversy over Berlusconi's TV appearance spilled over into a ruckus at Mediaset, where two top opposition officials refused to take part in a political debate also to have been aired tonight.
Democratic Left chief Piero Fassino, whose party is the largest in the opposition coalition, and Francesco Rutelli, who heads the centrist Daisy party, announced a boycott of the current affairs programme Matrix.
When Berlusconi renounced his plans to appear on TV, it was too late for Fassino and Rutelli to get back on the show because its other guests, Deputy Premier Gianfranco Fini and House Speaker Pier Ferdinando Casini, had already left the studios.
Mediaset Chairman Fedele Confalonieri, a long-term close friend of Berlusconi's, later gave a press conference in which he accused opposition politicians of launching a "media storm" against Mediaset. "I don't like the word 'regime' but this seems to be a dress rehearsal for one because when you decide to embargo a network and say 'don't go there because there's the plague',
then it becomes an ugly chapter in media history," he said. Confalonieri said Prodi's repeated refusals to take part in political debates hosted on the premier's TV channels was an "attack on the freedom of information".
