Giuliano Ferrara is a corpulent journalist who was a minister in Silvio Berlusconi's first government back in the 1990s. He is also the central – indeed, only – figure in Qui Radio Londra (Radio London Calling) on the first television channel of Italy's state-owned broadcasting corporation, RAI. Following immediately after the flagship evening news, his programme could not have a more influential slot.

Yet it consists of Ferrara sitting in front of the camera and lecturing viewers on whatever takes his fancy for between five and seven minutes. Ferrara is a brilliant man: articulate, provocative and well-read. But he is also unambiguously a Berlusconi man. His newspaper, Il Foglio, was founded with the help of money from the media tycoon's now-estranged wife and, when Berlusconi's last government pitched into crisis, Ferrara was summoned to give him advice. It is hard to think of anywhere in Europe, except perhaps Belarus, where a journalist so patently identified with one side would be given a chance to "clarify" the news.

To name his programme after the wartime BBC broadcasts to the anti-Nazi resistance, as if Qui Radio Londra was giving voice to the victims of dictatorship, is grotesque. Until last November, when he fell from power, Silvio Berlusconi had been in office for eight of the previous 10 years. During that timeBerlusconi's reign, RAI, whose board of governors reflects the balance of power in parliament, echoed the government's line on two of its three channels. Three of the remaining four main national channels are owned by Berlusconi.

Ferrara calls himself "the elephant", which is doubly appropriate in this context because Qui Radio Londra points to the elephant in the room of Italian politics: whatever else may have changed in Italy since Berlusconi left office last November, his intimidating media power remains untrammelled. And that is unlikely to change before the next general election, due in spring 2013.

The only significant media initiative by the "technocratic" government that replaced Berlusconi's has been to insist that a new batch of digital terrestrial TV frequencies be put up for auction (the Berlusconi government had decided they should be given away, and it is not hard to imagine to whom). Even that move was brave. Mario Monti's government is kept in power by an alliance of the three biggest groupings in parliament. And the biggest of all is still Berlusconi's Freedom People movement, the PdL. The government had wanted to reform RAI. But the parties that support it reportedly vetoed the idea. Last month the minister responsible sheepishly announced that there would not be enough time for a reform before the end of the legislature.

If the obscene concentration of media clout in Italy is being eroded, it's no thanks to its politicians. Rupert Murdoch's Sky Italia now reaches 5 million Italian households and its 24-hour news channel offers balanced, if anodyne, coverage. Even more important perhaps, there is the internet. Growing numbers of young Italians simply ignore traditional media outlets to get their news and opinion from a growing number of Italian-language current affairs web sites. But the change is slow. Internet penetration in Italy is among the lowest in the EU. By last year, according to Eurostat, almost 40% Italians had never been online, compared with just over 10% in Britain. Surveys have indicated that Italians still get around four-fifths of their news from broadcast media.

The effects of this are impossible to prove. But in 2010 a public body, the ISAE, carried out a survey to find out how Italians' perceptions of the economy corresponded with reality.

The replies showed that, on each of three counts (growth, inflation and unemployment) they thought things were better than they actually were when Berlusconi was in power, and worse than they were when his opponents were in office. In 2007, for example,, when Italy was run by the centre-left, people thought, on average, that the unemployment rate was 14.2%. In fact, it was less than half that figure. Within a year of Berlusconi return to power, the average perceived rate had plunged to 9.5%, even though the real figure barely changed.

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