Shocked? Indignant? Hard to tell, really. Most Italians simply don't know that Silvio Berlusconi has compared the plight of earthquake victims forced to sleep in tents in the wintry weather of the Abruzzo region to a camping holiday.

Television broadcasts tactfully ignored the slip. The good man, after all, was only trying to keep everyone's morale up. Virtually every newspaper in the country did the same. Only the readers of the very leftwing Il Manifesto were informed in a brief note: "Shock at 'camping weekend' comment. But only abroad." That's it, really. Past caring. If you can take the spectacle of your prime minister parading in front of TV cameras, massed officialdom and one miserable homeless old lady in an outsize fireman's helmet, you can take anything.

Berlusconi the blunderer is news abroad, not at home. The astonishing trail of antics and misdemeanours that Berlusconi blazed across Europe as he hopelessly tried to squeeze into the limelight of Barack Obama left the rest of the world gawping and most Italians apparently resigned. It's an old story, which may puzzle outsiders but not anyone familiar with the Italian media.

Trouble usually starts when Berlusconi ventures abroad. In Moscow at the end of last year, he hailed then president-elect Obama as "handsome, young and suntanned". (Speaking for the many Italians who cringed, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy said she was glad she was no longer an Italian citizen.) Back in 2003, during a debate at the European parliament in Strasbourg, he called a German MEP "kapo", as the guards in Nazi concentration camps were called, and said he would put him forward for a part in a film about the camps. In the same year he attempted to charm investors in New York with the line: "Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries." The list goes on.

At home, however, Berlusconi's image and public appearances are minutely managed. He chooses questions, his staff plan every outing and appearance, cameras are positioned at what he and his aides consider flattering angles. Remember, half the journalists in Italy work for him and the other half know they might do so one day.

Through his media group, Mediaset, Berlusconi and his family control three private national television channels (the family advertising company Publitalia supplies most of the others as well), two newspapers, a fleet of magazines, the biggest cinema circuit, and the country's largest book publisher. Conflict of interest? Ironed out of existence by self-serving legislation that the former hard-pressed and short-lived centre-left government of Romano Prodi never got round to abolishing. Thanks to another trademark law, Berlusconi overruled the constitutional court and legalised his virtual monopoly while consolidating absolute political control over the public service broadcaster RAI.

Even as the earthquake in the Abruzzo continues to wreak havoc, all the top jobs in RAI are up for grabs. Parliament has agreed on a new board of directors, and now Berlusconi and his allies are turning their attention to the newsrooms. Every one of the current heads of RAI's three TV networks, news programmes and radio services will be reappointed. According to tradition, the prime minister will pick the head of TG1, RAI's banner TV news programme. Its current incumbent, apparently well aware of Prodi's wobbly hold on power, was always remarkably polite to Berlusconi even when he was in opposition. He has been guaranteed a very soft landing as editor of the country's most important newspaper, the Corriere della Sera.

It should be cause for concern to any Italian that political horse-trading over the top media jobs in the country is so all-embracing that even the main privately owned newspaper is thrown into the same basket as the state broadcaster. But nobody turned a hair, and news of the appointment was recorded with zeal by every media outlet in the country.

In this situation the very notion of the media as watchdog has paled into insignificance. There will, no doubt, be some excellent investigative reporting on just why so many new buildings collapsed in the latest earthquake - in spite of existing, but apparently widely flouted, construction laws. But they will, if we are lucky, be shown late at night on the one channel traditionally conceded to the opposition. That is, if the new appointee thinks fit to renew the best investigative journalists' contracts.

On his return from his tour of London and Strasbourg, Berlusconi raged publicly at the journalists who had had the cheek of reporting on his embarrasments. "We will take steps!" he threatened. The first step Mr Berlusconi should take, however, is thinking more carefully before opening his mouth.

• Tana de Zulueta is a former Italian MP and board member of Articolo 21, an NGO supporting press freedoms

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