Italy’s deputy prime minister has threatened to pull advertising by state-run companies in newspapers as he accused them of “polluting the political debate every day”.

The intervention by Luigi Di Maio, who leads the Five Star Movement (M5S), was the latest in a long-running series of attacks by the party on the media, and echoed tirades by Donald Trump, who has called American journalists “enemies of the people”.

Di Maio said the government was preparing a letter to ask state-run companies to stop buying advertising space. “It will not be like this any more. Our country needs free information and pure publishers, with their only interest being to readers,” he said.

Italian newspapers have long been accused of serving the interest of a small elite rather than properly informing citizens. M5S, which built much of its support online, has long lamented traditional media, claiming that it perpetrates “fake news”, a phrase popularised by Trump shortly after he became US president. M5S itself has been accused of spreading misinformation via unofficial social media accounts.

Mattia Diletti, a politics professor at Rome’s Sapienza University, said Italy’s coalition government was “thinking about killing off the mainstream media once and for all”.

He said M5S built consensus and disseminated information online, and therefore “see nothing wrong with damaging the mainstream media”.

Attacking the media could also be a tactic to shore up support among voters, Diletti said, at a time when the popularity of Matteo Salvini, the interior minister and leader of M5S’s far-right coalition partner, the League, is surging.

Newspaper readership in Italy is generally low, and most people use television or social media to keep informed. “If the Italian press is shut down it would affect few people,” said Diletti. “M5S knows that the media is not popular, so … it is hard to see people revolting.”

In a separate development on Monday, the state broadcaster Rai suspended a series about a Calabrian town praised for its efforts to integrate refugees.

Rai said the suspension was due to an investigation that began last year into Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace, for alleged corruption. But the timing was suspicious, given that Salvini attacked Lucano within weeks of taking office.

On Monday Italian media said the government was lining up Marcello Foa, a nationalist who has often spoken out against immigration, as president of Rai.

Additional reporting by Lorenzo Tondo