Berlusconi`s Pop-Politics - the University of Salford

Transcription

Berlusconi's Pop-Politics: When the Private and the Public Sphere Converge
D. Ceccobelli, A. Ciaglia & M. Mazzoni
Silvio Berlusconi and Post-modern Politics
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
14 December 2012
Berlusconi’s Pop-Politics:
When the Private and Public Spheres Converge
DIEGO CECCOBELLI
(Sum - Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane)
ANTONIO CIAGLIA
(Sum - Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane)
MARCO MAZZONI
(Università degli Studi di Perugia)
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1. INTRODUCTION
In Italy, as well as in many other Western countries, politicians’ private lives are being considered with
increasing attention by both audiovisual and printed media. In fact, gossip magazines and TV shows whose main aim is to entertain their audiences – have started covering political and institutional actors
as (or even more) often as they cover personalities who are generally considered more suitable for such
outlets, such as sports stars, Hollywood actors, showmen and showgirls. There is, however, an Italian
politician who, regardless of the office he holds, has been and continues being particularly newsworthy
to these media: the former Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
By presenting the results of a content analysis of four Italian gossip magazines (Chi, Gente, Novella
2000 and Oggi) issued between July 2010 and June 2012, we aim to show that even though Berlusconi
stepped down as Italian Prime minister in November 2011, he is still one of the absolute protagonists in
the stories and discourses of the entertainment printed media. In our perspective, this result is mainly
due to two crucial explanations. Firstly, Berlusconi is the Italian politician who much more successfully
than others manages to open the doors of his private life to the public, building on it an epic discourse.
Secondly, gossip magazines’ continuative attention over Berlusconi’s life has a close connection with
the shocking scandals that have been embroiling his figure since when he was in charge as Prime
minister. Regarding this second point, we will demonstrate both how the Berlusconi's conduct belongs
to the scandal's category and that inside the Italian gossip press market a political scandal is covered
differently among the four celebrity magazines we analyzed.
Starting from these considerations, we will try to answer the following research question: How do
political scandals affect Italian soft media’s coverage of national politically relevant figures? By
presenting our most significant findings, we will show that in some way the so-called “Italian anomaly”
is affecting also the gossip press sector, being the market leader in this specific field owned by the
Berlusconi's family. In fact, being the gossip press “the” media of the scandals, an in-depth analysis of
the celebrity magazines has represented a privileged point of view to evaluate the exact extent to which
one of the most newsworthy kinds of scandal on tap, a sexual one involving Silvio Berlusconi, the most
popular Italian politician with a continuously scrutinized private life, was covered. This is the main
reason behind our belief that the exceptionality of the Italian case deserves to be analyzed as a case
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study.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 - Politicians’ private and public dimensions
In recent years a vast debate about the progressive blurring of a line that once markedly divided the
private and the public dimension of politicians started to animate both political and social sciences. By
using terms like “popularization” (Mazzoleni e Sfardini 2009) “celebritization” (Marshall 1997; West
and Orman 2003; Street 2004; Kellner 2009; Marsh, 't Hart e Tindall 2010) and “intimization” (Stanyer
2012), scholars differently labeled various specifications of this phenomenon.
Starting from the first one among this three, with the word “popularization” Mazzoleni and Sfardini
(2009) mean that:
mostly due to the role played by TV, facts and people, stories and words that traditionally belong to
politics – which is usually seen as a both complex and self-referring terrain, as a world that is very
far away from ordinary people’s daily lives – have increasingly become topics of general interest,
opportunities for entertainment, in the very same way as those characters and people who already
are part of the showbiz (p. 14).
Therefore, the presence of politicians in entertaining TV shows or in the celebrity magazines pages
further proofs the new relationship establishing between politics, media and citizens. By merging itself
with the actors and the topics of the popular culture, politics has found a way to be closer to the
constituency and more in touch with the problems that are faced by the so-called ordinary people on a
daily basis.
This has led to the second process, that can be identified by the celebrity politics theory. In fact, as
stated by John Street (2004), “the politicians were playing at being pop stars; the musicians were
playing at being politicians” (p. 435), pointing out a situation in which the politics, spectacle and world
of celebrities' fields are not separated, but ever more mixed and intermingled. A process that is leading
to a progressive de-sacralization of the politics' sphere and characterized by the media consume of the
political figures throughout the celebrity's frame (Thompson 2000; Corner and Pels 2003). This
symbolic metamorphosis of politicians, perceived like celebrities, has open a breach for a continuous
and conspicuous presence of politics in media outlets such as the gossip press, specialized and
dedicated to the media representation of Hollywood actors, showmen and showgirls. Furthermore, as
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reported in his Celebrity and Power (1997), David Marshall, observing the scrutiny on politicians
progressively moving from the policy's views by the personal traits and the private behavior, wrote:
the modern politics of aura and distance is drawn into the constant search for the politics of the
personal and the intimate, so that the portrayed image can somehow be matched by the “real”
activities of the individual candidate. In the same way the film celebrity is constructed between his
or her filmic aura and how the intersects with his or her everyday behavior, the political leader
becomes the object of scrutiny not so much on policies but almost in terms of personal habits (p.
230, 231).
The third process aforementioned, that is the “intimization” of politics follows this first suggestion
pointed out by David Marshall. In fact, according to James Stanyer (2012), the personal lives of
politicians have became ever more visible, producing the effects of overwhelming (with different
degrees in different countries) both the public dimension of a political leader and the issues positioning
of his or her parties itself. In his argumentation, it is also stressed the necessity to overcome the idea of
personalization of politics, which is mostly focused on leaders rather than political parties, with what
he called “intimization”. As reported in his definition,
intimization can be seen in simple terms as a revelatory process which involves the publicizing of
information and imagery from what we might ordinarily understand as a politician's personal life –
broadly defined. It is a publicity process that takes place over time and involves flows of personal
information and imagery into the mediated sphere (p. 14).
In sum, these three different ways of labeling these changing in progress would have produced,
according to Boni (2008), the effect of transforming politics into a media spectacle in which the
citizens play the role of spectators. In fact, the progressive “popularization” of politics and the
contemporary “celebritization” of politicians would have automatically created a framework in which
the endless visibility of political leaders’ persona and intimacy, as well as the broad coverage they
daily receive from both entertaining TV shows and tabloids, have transformed politicians into stars,
such as actors and TV hosts. The principal media frame celebrating this new form of popularity is
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gossip (p. 48, 49)
As a result, in this marriage between the politics and popular culture, and between politics and
showbiz, the presence of an increasing number of pictures and articles about politicians on media
outlets such as entertaining TV shows and celebrity magazines becomes natural, as well as the interest
over private aspects of politicians’ lives increases.
2.2 – Political scandals
Together with this progressive blurring of a line that once markedly divided the private and the public
dimension of politicians, the flooding of politics into alternative media outlets is closely related to that
part of literature that drops into the political scandal subfield. According to John B. Thomson (2000)
'scandal' refers to actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known
to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response (p. 13; italics original).
Therefore, by analyzing in depth this phenomenon, Thompson identifies five specifics characteristics
that are needed to have a scandal: i) the transgression of values, norms or moral codes; ii) the presence
of an element of secrecy and concealment; iii) the disapproval of the actions or events disputed; iv) the
express of the disapproval by publicly denouncing the actions or events; v) the likely damaging of the
individuals' reputation responsible for them (Ivi). Just this last point, that is the potential and not the
certain nature of the scandals to produce effects that represents the effective essence of this
phenomenon. Again in the words of Thompson,
scandals are struggles over symbolic power in which reputation and trust are at stake. Scandals do
not necessarily destroy reputation and undermine trust, but they have the capacity to do so. And it is
because of this capacity, this potential for damaging reputation and corroding relations of trust, that
scandals are of such significance in the political field (Ibidem, p. 245; italics original)
Recent developments have emphasized (i.e. the progressive “popularization”, “celebritization” and
“intimization” of politics aforementioned) a progressive potentiality for political scandals to increase
their prominence in the sense of both their occurrence and likelihood to produce political effects. The
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rise of negative campaigning is surely one of the most evident expressions of political scandals' pivotal
role in contemporary politics (Castells 2009). However, negative campaigning does not automatically
involve the presence and usage of political scandals for political ends. Indeed, such a phenomenon can
be better identified by looking more closely at the core objective it is principally aimed to, rather than
at the means it relies on. By turning to negative campaigning, politicians’ main aim is to attack their
opponents in any way. Nevertheless, negative campaigns and political scandals remain strongly linked.
In the last sentence, we purposely use the word “opponents” (plural), rather than “opponent” (singular),
to point out how both the negative campaigns and the political scandal are spreading through different
systems of government. In fact, not only in a presidential system like the American one, but also in a
parliamentary system like the Italian one, in which more than two candidate run for public office, it is
evident political scandal's increasing prominence. Hence, the scandal as a weapon to be used by
political competitors in a struggle for political advantage, is a phenomenon that does not only belong to
the American case (Adut 2008). The analysis of the Italian case focusing on the way in which the
gossip press has covered the Berlusconi's sex scandal, and mainly the so-called Ruby-gate, will be a
useful tool to comprehend, and this is our primary research question, “how political scandals affect
Italian soft media’s coverage of national politically relevant figures”. Being the gossip press the
“natural” media outlet in the coverage of scandals and this is even more evident in a media system like
the Italian one where the tabloid press is missing - we believe that this analytical choice might
represent an interesting perspective from which to look at the Berlusconi phenomenon,
2.3 – Overview of the Italian scenario.
Before discussing our methodology and our empirical findings, we will briefly provide some
background information on the Italian scenario in order to rightly contextualize the events under
analysis.
In November 2011 Silvio Berlusconi resigned as Italian Prime Minister. While the unsatisfactory way
in which the fourth Berlusconi government faced the development of the economic crisis played a
crucial role in the determination of this act, there also are another factors that deserve to be taken into
account, such as the progressive disclosure of a series of sexual scandals involving Silvio Berlusconi,
that could have had a role in co-determining this outcome. In fact, since April 2009, when he attended
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the 18th birthday of Noemi Letizia, a young beautiful girl living in a little town near Naples, a day by
day allegations regarding sexual transgressions related to eventual abuses of power started to engender
a lot of media coverage onto this facts involving the Prime Minister in office at that time. Furthermore,
figures like Noemi Letizia, Patrizia D'Addario, Emilio Fede, Ruby and Nicole Minetti, or idioms like
“Papi Silvio”, starting to assume international emphasis, being them reported in the most important
media all over the world (Stanyer 2012).
3. RESEARCH QUESTION AND METHODOLOGY
3.1 – Research question
In conducting this research we want to start off by sharing a very simple consideration: amongst the
huge variety of media outlets that crowd today’s advanced democracies, the gossip press should be
taken into particular consideration in order to properly understand the figure of Silvio Berlusconi. In
fact, by analyzing the four most popular and sold Italian celebrity magazines (Chi, Oggi, Gente and
Novella 2000) from July 2010 to June 2012, it is immediately clear how, for a complete understanding
of the “Berlusconi phenomenon”, the gossip press cannot be neglected. In this regard, trying to put
together the main two topics pointed out in the previous paragraph, namely the convergence of the
public and private sphere of politicians and the increasing prominence of political scandal in everyday
politics, we will try to answer the following research question: How do political scandals affect Italian
soft media’s coverage of national politically relevant figures? Just the media coverage in the Italian
gossip press of the sexual scandals embroiling Silvio Berlusconi, a Prime Minister accused, among all,
of having had a sexual affair with an underage girl, will be a paradigmatic case to shed a light on the
phenomenon under analysis.
3.2 – Methodology
In order to grab at best the data from the Italian gossip press we followed two analytical paths. Firstly,
we have carried on a content analysis of the articles centered on political (or politically relevant) actors.
In the second place, we have made an in-depth analysis of photos, because, unlike quality papers,
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pictures are a very relevant part of the gossip magazines’ articles.
As the Table 1 displays, the four magazines we have analyzed have more than 10 millions readers, with
Chi and Oggi, the former owned by Mondadori (in which the Berlusconi's family is the majority
stakeholder) and the latter by Rcs Mediagroup, representing the market leaders. The other two, Gente
and Novella 2000, are respectively owned by Hachette (a French editorial group) and again Rcs
Mediagroup.
Table 1 – Readers of four celebrity magazines in 2010 (absolute values in
thousands/percentage data).
The data in Table 1, as expected, show how the typical reader of the Italian gossip press is mainly a
middle-aged woman, with a tendency low level of instruction and, more significantly, living in the
North West area of the country. The data we obtained by analyzing the celebrity magazines are not
surprising particularly in terms of gender, age and education. More specifically, the geographic
connotation shows a slight trend in the direction of different specific Italian areas.
While in term of audience share and composition these data clearly justify why we believe this specific
media outlet cannot be neglected in the comprehension of the Italian politics, there is another reason to
be considered, which is the particular media logic at the basis of the gossip press. In fact, if one of the
main aim of our research is to understand how political scandals affect Italian soft media’s coverage of
national politically relevant figures, an in-depth analysis of the celebrity magazines represents a
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privileged point of view to evaluate the exact extent to which “the” media outlets of the scandals, such
as the gossip press, covered one of the most newsworthy kinds of scandal on tap: a sexual scandal
involving Silvio Berlusconi, the most popular Italian politicians with a continuously scrutinized private
life (Mazzoni and Ciaglia 2011).
4. EMPIRICAL FINDINGS
4.1 - Does the Berlusconi case fit into the definition of scandal?
As reported in the former paragraphs, although our analysis does not consider the starting point of the
Berlusconi sexual scandals series (see Noemi Letizia and Patrizia D'Addario cases), our period of
analysis (from July 2010 to June 2012) perfectly included all the passages of the most relevant scandal
on tap: a possible sexual affair between Silvio Berlusconi and Ruby, an underage beautiful girl, became
well-known with the “Ruby-gate” denomination.
According to Entman (2012), the so-called “Ruby-gate” definitely recalls the principal traits that
characterize a political scandal, and namely:
i) duration: the case is to be covered for more than a week, which fits with the Rubygate;
ii) prominence: the media attention is to be high, in the sense that every single media
outlet should cover the case. The scandal should be on the newspapers’ front-pages,
covered by the gossip press, discussed in both entertainment and political talk shows.
Again, this fits with the Ruby-gate in which figures like Nicole Minetti and Ruby
herself became public actors due to their prominent presence in the media.
Furthermore, the particular way in which newspapers and television news used to
cover the case, by recurring to photos and interviews and publishing scoops in the
gossip press, led to the prevalence of the scandal and gossip's dimension over the
political one;
iii) resonance: the scandal is narrated through both an evocative/symbolic language
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and provocative photos of the actors involved. And also this last trait fits perfectly
which the Ruby-gate. This is proved by the extremely detailed media coverage of
Berlusconi’s sexual affairs.
By applying this categorizations to the data we collected from the four most popular and sold Italian
celebrity magazines (Chi, Oggi, Gente and Novella 2000), we firmly believe the Berlusconi case fits
into the definition of scandal. We will proceed by presenting both an overview of the data we collected
through our content analysis and the results of a case-by-case analysis of each magazine. Afterwards,
we will describe and interpret the particular forms by which politics is represented in the Italian gossip
press.
4.2 – The private life of Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian gossip press
As shown in previous researches (Caniglia and Mazzoni 2011; Mazzoni and Ciaglia 2011), Tables 2
and 3 confirmed that there is especially an actor, namely Silvio Berlusconi, who is considered the most
newsworthy figure in the class of the political actors for the Italian gossip press.
Tab. 2 - The 15 most photographed actors in 4
Italian gossip magazines (July 2010 -June 2012)
Tab. 3 - The 15 most covered actors in 4 Italian
gossip magazines (July 2010 - June 2012)
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Therefore, not only himself, but all the actors related to his persona (his relatives; the sexual scandal's
girls; the members of his party, mainly the beautiful women he chose as ministers) are considered
figures of particular interest for the Italian gossip press. As debated in the theoretical paragraph, in
order to comprehend the possible reasons behind the exclusive newsworthiness of both Berlusconi and
Berlusconi-related personalities, we believe that the right way to advance some first interpretations
would be by mainly referring to the theories of popularization, celebritization and intimization of
politics. The fact that nowadays politicians are becoming ever more like celebrities as the actors of
Hollywood or the stars of television (Marshall 1997; West and Orman 2003; Turner 2004; Boni 2008;
Mazzoleni e Sfardini 2009; Stanyer 2012) and moreover that the public opinion “is associating the
politicians to the actors and the characters of the television” (Oliverio Ferraris 1999, 120), sees in the
representational choices followed by the gossip press a solid proof of the occurrence of this process.
If the mediated exposure in the celebrity magazines is one of the elements that certify and celebrate the
status of celebrity, the Italian case has surely confirmed the marriage between politicians and world of
the celebrities. What our research is showing is that this process, which is common to the political
sphere as a whole, is mainly involving and being exploited by a single actor: Silvio Berlusconi.
In a first stage of our research, namely once we got only one year analyzed, we believed that the data
we were collecting in the Italian gossip press should have been interpreted by arguing that “the more
relevant the office politicians hold, the more newsworthy they are considered”; that “Italian centre-right
politicians are ideologically not as reticent in showing themselves outside the 'institutional cage' as
their opponents are” and finally that “a relevant role in the centre-right area is played by both Silvio
Berlusconi and his family, his entourage, and, more generally, the people around him -because- the
Berlusconis are the Italian Royal family: they are the richest family in Italy, and Berlusconi’s sons and
daughters are likely to show themselves on the gossip magazines” (Mazzoni and Ciaglia 2011, p. 22).
With the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister and the advent of Mario Monti, our
interpretations of the phenomenon under analysis do not break down. The newsworthiness of the most
relevant politicians still remained high, as well as the presence of center-right politicians (with still the
absence of the center-left opponents) and the pivotal role played by Silvio Berlusconi's figure. In fact,
the former Prime Minister has been and still is the Italian politician who much more successfully than
others managed to open the doors of his private life to the public, building on it an epic discourse.
About it, one of the evidences of our research is surely this ability, propensity and disposition,
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displayed by Silvio Berlusconi, to provide the Italian public with a constant and continuous media
coverage of private aspects of his persona.
Among those scholars that are studying this overlap between the private and the public dimension of
politicians James Stanyer, in his Intimate Politics, writes:
it is often remarked that the personal lives of politicians, like those of sports, film and television
stars and host of other celebrities, have become a familiar part of the public's daily media
consumption. The public, it might be said, know more detail about politicians' personal lives than
their policy stance or voting records. Like celebrities in other fields they have willingly surrendered
their privacy, or have been unable to defend it from celebrity-obsessed media (p. 1).
And when it comes to politicians, ‘personal lives’ means knowing aspects of both their lives and at the
same time of their relatives and every single person who is linkable to themselves. In this direction, the
Italian case sees both a level of ordinariness and extraordinariness caused by the substantial reduction
of this tendency into the figure of Silvio Berlusconi. As already mentioned, this is an exclusive
characteristic of the Italian center-right politicians, who have found in Silvio Berlusconi the extreme
interpreter of such proclivity. The data shown in Table 2 and Table 3 have distinctly shown how actors
like Barbara Berlusconi (his second daughter), Veronica Lario (his second ex wife) and Luigi
Berlusconi (his last son) have raised a lot of interest in the Italian gossip press, which brought Mazzoni
and Ciaglia (2011) to the hypothesis of Silvio Berlusconi as “the Italian king”.
To check the real magnitude of this thesis, a research conducted by Diego Ceccobelli 1 onto the Swedish
gossip press has compared the depiction of the Swedish royal family with Silvio Berlusconi's one. First
of all, the Swedish case, unlike the Italian one, has pointed out a low media coverage of the politicians
in this specific media outlet. Practically, the only “political” presence that can be traced could be
summed in the large media representation of all the actors included in the royal families' category. By
comparing these two gossip press belonging to different media systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004), a
qualitative analysis has demonstrated how the way in which the members of Berlusconi's family are
represented in the Italian gossip press recalls the specific media logic followed in the depiction of the
royal families' figures. As denoted in the following pictures, it is possible to detect the same ability and
importance of being in the cover page, and the same attention to every single event of the private life:
from the birth of a baby to the place and way holidays are spent.
1 A research conducted for the master's thesis of Diego Ceccobelli (2011) and titled The Popularization of Politics: The Case
of The Gossip Press.
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Figure 1 - Gente n°28/2010, Barbara
Berlusconi, Berlusconi's daughter, with her
babies during the summer holidays
Figure 3 - Hant Extra n°13/2011, Madeleine,
princess of Sweden, with her partner during
the winter holidays
Figure 2 - Chi n°44/2010, Piersilvio
Berlusconi, Berlusconi's son, with his
newborn baby
Figure 4 - Dam n°8/2011, Frederik André
Henrik Christian, prince of Denmark, with one
of his newborn twin
Our research on the Italian gossip press and the comparison with the Swedish case are pointing out the
presence of an ongoing process: politicians, and in the Italian case mainly the figure of Silvio
Berlusconi and all the actors related to his persona, are becoming, according to the criteria of
newsworthiness of the celebrity magazines, mere celebrities like sports stars, Hollywood actors,
showmen and showgirls. In the case of Silvio Berlusconi a celebrity with a particular status: the royalty
one.
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According to Liesbet Van Zoonen (2005),
celebrities come in various distinction and degrees (e.g., Giles, 2000), but what qualifies the
megastars is the paradoxical combination of being perceived as an “ordinary, regular” guy who is
just like his fans (“she or he is one of us”) and someone who is very special at the same time. This
mixture of perceived proximity and distance has been noted as typical for the public admiration of
royalty (p. 82).
And the media representation on the gossip press through the lenses of the royal status has allowed to
Silvio Berlusconi of being perceived as both “an ordinary” and at the same time a special figure,
enabling the former Italian Prime Minister to maintain “the aura, the 'greatness', that surrounded
political leaders and institutions in the past” (Thompson 2000, p. 40). An aura of greatness that is easily
lost in this unveiling's process of the private aspects of a public persona (“ordinary, regular”), but that
could be regained with this particular symbolic representation got by the Berlusconi's family, depicted
like the Italian royal one (“special”). The media coverage of actors such as Barbara Berlusconi or
Veronica Lario and the “royal family” framing helped him to attain just this goal: the possibility to
appear both like “the man of the street”, hence in touch with the ordinary people and thus
“comprehensible”, than like a special one, who is worthy to hold public office.
As reported by Dick Perls (2003), the “de-auraticisation of high culture which, in its closer
approximation to the popular, is also a process of de-rationalisation, contextualisation and
emotionalisation […] tends to diminish the distance between political professionals and ordinary
citizens” (p. 58). Moreover, “political leaders shed their elitist aura and try to become ‘one of
us’”(Ibidem, p. 59). Does it represent the surrender of politics to “the man of the street” logic?
According to Pels the answer is not, because “on the other hand, distance is reasserted by the
remoteness of the star who, while dwelling constantly in the public eye, is still seen as untouchable and
as ‘living in a different world’. In this sense, politicians increasingly share in the extraordinary
ordinariness which characterizes the modern democratic celebrity” (Ivi). Exactly this movement of
losing and regaining distance is at the base of the presence in the gossip magazines. This could just be
the case of Silvio Berlusconi. As the “other” celebrities, he is both represented as not that different
from ordinary people, but at the same time surrounded by an aura of extraordinariness and infallibility.
Concluding this paragraph about the relationship between Silvio Berlusconi’s private and public lives,
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it could be useful also to refer to Graeme Turner’s words (2004):
we can map the precise moment a public figures becomes a celebrity. It occurs at the point at which
media interest in their activities is transferred from reporting on their public role (such as their
specific achievements in politics or sport) to investigating the details of their private lives (p. 8).
And this perfectly fits the case of Silvio Berlusconi. In some way, he appears like more a celebrity than
a politician even because, as reported by Paolo Mancini (2011), “Italian citizens pay more attention to
the Berlusconi lifestyle than to his political program that most will never read” (p. 58). As the
following pictures again reveal, in the Italian gossip press, as expected considering the particular media
logic the celebrity magazines rely upon, the depiction of Silvio Berlusconi is mostly staged with
pictures and stories about his private life, from his youth to his everyday life as a father of two sons and
three daughters and a grandfather of six grandchildren.
Figure 5 - Oggi n°26/2010, A young Silvio Berlusconi
in a swimsuit
Figure 6 - Chi n° 34/2010, Silvio Berlusconi with one
of his nephew
If the depiction of the ‘private field’ does represent an important aspect for any scholar to comprehend
the figure of Silvio Berlusconi and his representation in the Italian gossip press, the Tables 2 and 3
suggest that there is another trait, namely the sexual scandal dimension, that needs to be analyzed more
in-depth. In fact, the different ways in which the four celebrity magazines under analysis have covered
the sexual scandals of Silvio Berlusconi allow us to make a further step towards the explanation of all
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the effects of the close connections between the political and media spheres in the Italian context,
before and after the so-called “Berlusconi era”.
4.3 – The sexual scandals of Silvio Berlusconi: the Ruby-gate's case
Both in Tables 2 and 3, together with actors like Barbara Berlusconi and Veronica Lario, it is shown the
high level of newsworthiness of personalities like Ruby and Nicole Minetti. These two young beautiful
girls are the main protagonists of the sexual scandals embroiling the former Italian Prime Minister.
Nicole Minetti, worldwide less known than Ruby, is a regional councilor indicated as the pivotal
organizer of the sexual parties in which Silvio Berlusconi would have had a sexual affair with an
underage. Therefore, in terms of both number of photos and pages, Ruby and Nicole Minetti represent,
after Silvio Berlusconi and one of his daughter, namely Barbara Berlusconi, two of the most covered
actors by the Italian gossip press. This clear indicates that together with the coverage of what we called
“the Berlusconis” (Mazzoni and Ciaglia 2011), the sexual scandals involving Silvio Berlusconi
monopolized the depiction of the Italian politics in the celebrity magazines.
What is interesting to note is that, in same way, such continuous media coverage did not cause relevant
effects on the popularity of Silvio Berlusconi.
Figure 7 – Level of trust in Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister and in his government (May 2008 - October
2011). Source: Ipr Marketing
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As reported in Figure 7, even if the so-called Ruby-gate comes out at the beginning of November 2010
and immediately started to grasp a lot of attention from the Italian media, the level of trust in Silvio
Berlusconi during his last time in office shows no evident critical falling as a revelation of a possible
sexual affair with an underage could provoke. In fact, what Figure 7 points out is a substantial absence
of negative political effects on Silvio Berlusconi’s popularity rates just in that period. The polling
conducted in the period immediately after the first allegations of the hypothesized sex scandal have not
registered a significant shrinking of the level of trust in Silvio Berlusconi as a Prime Minister. As
already mentioned, we believe that analyzing the possible reason behind an highly expected outcome
from the perspective of the Italian gossip press should allow a better comprehension of the
phenomenon under analysis.
The data shown in the former paragraphs are certainly able to provide a first overview of the
relationship between the gossip press and the Italian politics. However, without an in-depth analysis of
the single criteria of newsworthiness followed by each magazine most information would be left aside.
Tab. 6 - The 15 most photographed actors in Chi
(July 2010 - June 2012)
Tab. 7 - The 15 most photographed actors in Oggi
(July 2010 - June 2012)
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Tab. 8 - The 15 most photographed actors in
Gente (July 2010 - June 2012)
Novella 2000 (July 2010 - June 2012)
While actors such as Silvio Berlusconi and one of his daughter Barbara are the most covered actors in
all 4 celebrity magazines under analysis, things change if we turn our attention to the protagonists of
the Ruby-gate. In fact, only in Oggi and Novella 2000 both Ruby and Nicole Minetti are listed in the 15
most photographed actors, while in Chi and Gente Ruby is out of this list whereas Nicole Minetti is
covered with a significant amount of photos only by Chi. To advance a proper interpretation of these
data, it would also be useful to analyze the precise way in which these 4 celebrity magazines have been
covering the main stages of the Ruby-gate.
Confirming the data in the former four tables, the quantitative analysis related to a specific time,
namely the 12 weeks after the coming out of the “Ruby scandal”, shows how one of the most
newsworthy scandal on tap for a gossip magazine has been missed by two of the most read ones. While
in the case of Gente one of the possible explanation could be represented by a specific decision that
was made in terms of marketing positioning (as shown in the former tables is, among these four, that
one less inclined to focus on political actors) regarding to Chi, the magazine own by the Berlusconi's
family, need to be found other explications.
18
Chi (November 2010 - 20 January 2011)
Oggi (November 2010 - 20 January 2011)
Gente (November 2010 - 20 January 2011)
Novella2000 (November 2010 - 20 January
2011)
In an episode of Presa Diretta (a television program on Rai3) aired in October 2011, a journalistic
investigation conducted by Alessandro Sortino tried to shed a light on the Italian magazine market. He
found out that the magazine Chi plays the quite uncontested role of the market leader, successfully
determining what the actors and the eventual scandal covered on this kind of media outlet have to be.
19
As stated by Fabrizio Corona, at that time an entrepreneur who created a new celebrity magazines 2,
Chi is the ‘bible of gossip’, because it is the sole magazine you can earn money from. ‘Scoop
agencies’ are almost broken because no paper buys their reports any longer. Chi is the only
magazine with a payroll that is worth more than 100k euro. All turn to Chi. That occurs because
Signorini is the king of gossip, he has the power to decide whether and what to buy, and he always
manages to have fresh material to be published. He knows anything about anyone. No matter
whether or not he decides to publish any report. What he publishes becomes publicly known, what
he doesn’t publish will be made public afterwards, in one of the TV shows he regularly attends, for
example. This gives him power. Everybody who is anybody is on Chi. If you’re not you don’t
matter. This is why showbiz people need to be on Chi.
According to this investigation, every single Italian scandal ends up on the table of Chi's director and
there, due to a lot of different reasons, he decides whether to publish it or close it into his strongbox.
Most remarkably, if he does decide to publish, he also establishes how to treat the scandal in the pages
of his magazine. Coming back to the Ruby-gate, the data indicates that the market leader in the
depiction, framing and representation of the scandals in the Italian gossip press missed “the” news
regarding his editor. More than missing the news about the Ruby-gate, a qualitative analysis of the
articles published in Chi, Oggi, Gente and Novella2000 after the beginning of this specific sexual
scandal have pointed out the particular way in which the celebrity magazine owned by the Berlusconi's
family has framed this topic. The point is: do the four celebrity magazines under analysis manage the
sexual scandals involving Silvio Berlusconi in the same way? Also, does Berlusconi's image go really
destroyed?
Our data indicates that there are evident differences in the media coverage of the four magazines under
analysis and, more importantly, there is a particular magazine called Chi, that tries to defend the image
of the former Prime Minister. Throughout the development of the Ruby-gate, Chi publishes a total
amount of twelve articles, only two of which are directly related to Ruby while other five pertain to
some girls who participated in the sexual parties. In the articles Silvio Berlusconi is depicted as a good
person, generous, strongly linked to his family and “haunted by the justice”. He is a charismatic man
who is fascinated by women because, as reported in the articles, he considers them “more clever than
man”, while the dinners at Arcore’ where depicted like “an innocent relaxation after work”.
2 Fabrizio Corona is very famous to the Italian public for being often protagonist of scandalous and glamourous
vicissitudes.
20
On the contrary, Ruby appears afraid and bewildered by the events. Her tough past is regularly recalled:
she is in such a need for Berlusconi's help. In sum, the readers of Chi (more than 3,5 million), read
articles that are sided in defense of Berlusconi and make no reference to the well-known scandals. Here
emerges the characterization of a man whose lifestyle is totally incompatible with the accusations that
have been raised. Furthermore, the articles focus on some of the girls that participated in the “dinners at
Arcore”, framing them as “innocent and pleasant” parties.
Switching to the other magazines, quite everything changes. Novella2000, for example, even publishes
nineteen articles on the “sexual-parties” girls. The explanation we suggest is that the Ruby-gate
perfectly fits with the magazine's standards. For that reason, the articles emphasize the spiciest aspects
of the scandals with a strong exploitation of outrageous pictures of the girls involved. Inevitably,
Berlusconi appears like a rich man without any limits and, in one article, he is even defined as “a Don
Giovanni in love with women”. As a celebrity magazine would be expected to do, there are also some
“esoteric” readings of these vicissitudes, namely the cases in which Berlusconi is portrayed
as
“possessed by a demon”.
The magazine that mostly deepens the Ruby-gate is Oggi with twenty-six articles, a lot of them focused
on Ruby and the other girls, who are largely depicted as “damned, cunning and outrageous”. With
regard to Silvio Berlusconi, his morality is frequently debated. In fact, not only are the facts covered,
but they are also framed with a direct critique to his behavior. Furthermore, the magazine published
interviews,which went both against (Bill Emmott) and in defense of him (Evelina Manna). The last
magazine, Gente, dedicates only five articles to the Ruby-gate,where the events are reconstructed quite
summarily and neutrally. Nevertheless this magazine, as its usual habit, presents this kind of facts by
interviewing some experts (in this case the most critique is of Mario Cervi), who often question and
blame Berlusconi’s behavior.
In sum, with regard to the Ruby-gate, Chi appears a partisan magazine that tries to defend his owner,
while the other magazines tend to criticize Berlusconi’s conduct. The reason for that is easy to find: the
other magazines just treat these facts for what they are: scandals. Having involved celebrities like the
former Prime Minister and publicly known beautiful girls, the frame that has been used is quite
automatically the frame of the scandal.
21
5. CONCLUSIONS
Our analysis of the four most popular and sold Italian celebrity magazines has clearly shown how, for a
complete understanding of the “Berlusconi phenomenon”, the gossip press cannot be neglected. In fact,
the results of a content analysis of Chi, Gente, Novella 2000 and Oggi issued between July 2010 and
June 2012 has demonstrated that two primary reasons - the easiness for Silvio Berlusconi to open the
doors of his private life to the public scrutiny and the shocking scandals that have been embroiling his
figure since when he was in charge as Prime minister - allow him to be the absolute protagonist in the
stories and discourses of the entertainment printed media. In the Italian media system, a media outlet
that, due to the characteristics of its readership, has to be considered a relevant source of information
for a considerable part of the Italian society.
What we firstly have shown in this research is that the particular way in which the Italian gossip press
has depicted not only himself, but all the member of his family, allows Silvio Berlusconi to be
perceived as both an “ordinary” and at the same time a “special” figure, leading to likely positive
effects for his public image. Therefore, by comparing the Italian case with the Swedish one, we had
another confirm that “the Berlusconis” are covered by the gossip press as if they were the Italian Royal
family. Secondly, the analysis of how each magazine under analysis covered the sexual scandal's series
involving Silvio Berlusconi has allowed us to make a further step towards the explanation of all the
effects of the close connections between the political and media spheres in the Italian context, before
and after the so-called “Berlusconi era”. As the quantitative analysis of the 12 weeks after the coming
out of the “Ruby scandal” has shown, one of the most newsworthy scandal on tap for a gossip
magazine has been missed by the market leader of this specific field. In fact, just during this period
Chi, the celebrity magazine owned by the Berlusconi's family, more than missing the news about the
Ruby-gate tried to defend the image of the former Prime Minister.
Having to answer our research question, that is How do political scandals affect Italian soft media’s
coverage of national politically relevant figures?, we believe that the sexual scandals involving the
former Prime Minister have shown how the so-called “Italian anomaly” played a significant role also in
the gossip press market, determining both the degree of visibility and the way in which the scandals
were framed. Therefore, the absence of a highly partisan celebrity magazines like Chi clearly aligned
22
with the opposite political wing, as La Repubblica in the quality newspapers or Rai3 in the television
sphere, has surely contributed to emphasize the particular way in which the gossip press has covered
Berlusconi's sexual scandals.
23
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Berlusconi`s Pop-Politics - the University of Salford

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