Read: The new populist playbook

All Italian governments generally help dictate the line of the state-run news broadcaster, the RAI, and through the latest government, Italian television news was led by stories of immigrants, often people of color, who had committed crimes. This also seeped into newspaper coverage, which has less of an impact in shaping public opinion but has always been a barometer of power dynamics and business interests. This is not new: During the nearly two decades that Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italy in three stints as prime minister, he too set the agenda of much of the RAI.

Yet it was the Italian press and, perhaps more importantly, his private television channels which were key in cultivating the viewership that then became his electorate. Berlusconi’s channels were also crucial to helping Salvini.

When it seemed Salvini was on the way up, when he seemed to stand a chance of coming to power, powerful commentators were cautious with him, and respectful. Two days before elections for the European Parliament in May, a friendly host on a Berlusconi-owned channel interviewed Salvini, gushing that he looked very healthy and suntanned, effectively letting him give a campaign speech, and didn’t ask him any hard questions. As they were wrapping up, he handed her a rosary—part of a campaign strategy to win over devout Catholic voters.

After Salvini’s party placed first in those elections, with 34 percent of the vote, Maurizio Costanzo, one of Italy’s most famous television hosts, also on a Berlusconi channel, had Salvini on his show, and let him talk about how he’d gained weight on the campaign trail. Costanzo’s has never been a confrontational show, but still, he didn’t call Salvini out on any of his statements about how the European Union was subjugating Italy or how Europe ran the risk of being “replaced” by immigrants.

Read: The More You Watch TV, The More You Vote Populist

Italians have a pretty astute sense of how to interpret the media—or they did when it was clear who was in Berlusconi’s camp and who wasn’t. Things are more complicated today with the populists, who see themselves as part of a post-ideological landscape in which they have no use for the mainstream press. They prefer to use social media to communicate with the people directly, so the only way to get access as a “mainstream” journalist is to basically embed within the parties and drink the Kool-Aid, or as much of it as you can bear. Which isn’t great for democracy.

It’s not surprising that perhaps the most significant piece of reporting to emerge during Salvini’s tenure didn’t appear in an Italian publication. BuzzFeed News published a scoop with audio recordings of a secret meeting last fall in Moscow between associates of Salvini, discussing an energy deal that allegedly would have funneled money to the League, in violation of Italian campaign-finance laws. The deal didn’t happen, but Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation. (Italy’s Espresso, a center-left weekly magazine, broke the story in February, but BuzzFeed had the audio.)