Is Renzi’s tweet the beginning of the end for Italy’s pantomime political TV?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/italy-talkshow-crisis-politics-matteo-renzi

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Running on his treadmill in Palazzo Chigi this week, Matteo Renzi, Italy’s youthful prime minister, became so irate at the political talkshow he was watching, Piazza Pulita (Sweep up the Square), that he felt the need to vent to his 1.6 million Twitter followers.

“Plots, secrets, fake scoops, bollocks, and backward thinking: it takes just one night of watching television to understand Italy’s talkshow crisis,” he wrote.

It was striking criticism from a man who owes his rapid ascent in politics in part to his successful television appearances, where his boyish looks and casual dress – he often wears jeans, a white shirt and no tie – solidified his reputation as a reformer.

But even critics who say Renzi’s attack was hypocritical and inappropriate given his role admit what sliding ratings already prove: the prime minister had a point.

One any given night, Italy’s myriad political talkshows can look more like tame versions of the WWE than programmes serving up serious and informative political discourse. In a country suffering from a deep economic slump, the shows are heavy on melodrama and lengthy, orchestrated fights, and light on fact-checking and hard-hitting interviews.

Viewership has dropped by two million people since the height of the economic crisis, according to a review of the audience data by Termometro Politico, an online newsletter.

“It is like political entertainment, which is necessary because most people wouldn’t watch coverage of politics without these peaks of exaggeration,” says Carlo Alberto Carnevale-Maffè, a professor at the Bocconi School of Management in Milan. “The talkshows are intended not to provide an objective view, but to create a reality TV show of politicians clashing.”

One of the most well-known television spats of recent years involved Silvio Berlusconi, the former premier and current head of the centre-right opposition Forza Italia, and the talkshow host Michele Santoro, whom he had essentially fired from public television in 2002 along with two other journalists who challenged him.

In 2013, with a general election campaign in full swing, the two nearly came to blows in a heated shouting match. At one point Berlusconi hugged the journalist and then dramatically walked to a seat that had been used by another journalist foe, Marco Travaglio, and, in a move reminiscent of the Jerry Springer Show, wiped it clean with a handkerchief he had in his back pocket before sitting down.

Talkshows were not always so cringe-worthy. Michele Anzaldi, a member of parliament in Renzi’s Democratic party (PD) who has oversight of television networks, says that in their heyday in the early 1990s they gave voice to topics that the media had been ignoring, including stories about the mafia and the rise of the rightwing Northern League.

“Today, what stories about Italy do they tell? Often they’re limited to political intrigue and to non-stop chatter,” he says. “The crisis in the talkshows is not an opinion or up for debate: it is certified by the ratings. Even the primetime shows don’t get double-digit viewership, as was the case a few years ago.”

The talkshow crisis reflects a crisis in Italian politics, says Alessia Rotta, a journalist and PD MP. During the era of Berlusconi, she says, it was easy to present debates: you were for him or against him, on the left or the right. “The situation has changed completely,” she says. “It is more complicated now, more similar to the reality of a country. There are not only two sides and this is more difficult to represent in a way.”

The rise of anti-establishment politicians and parties, especially the Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Beppe Grillo, a former comedian who makes a point of abstaining from talkshows, has fractured Italian politics and shaken up traditional alliances.

Renzi, a left-leaning centrist, has had to ally himself with Berlusconi on the right to pass his agenda, and Matteo Salvini, the head of the Northern League, which has its roots as a secessionist party, is now looking south of Rome for support of his refashioned anti-immigrant, anti-European Union agenda.

“People are bored of political protagonism,” Rotta says. “Politics have many times been empty of values, ideas, facts, and politicians have just gone on television to make promises without doing anything. So this is really linked to the crisis of traditional parties.”

It is also a reflection of the depressed Italian psyche, a psychiatrist at the University of Chieti, Massimo Di Giannantonio, told the Italian news outlet Adn Kronos. “Italians who are facing the most difficult economic crisis of the last 50 years find it unbearable to listen to words that don’t contain a hint of a solution for their personal problems or their country,” he said.

Renzi’s critical tweet on Monday night was sent at a sensitive moment, days before the beginning of a presidential election campaign in which he is seeking to rally MPs around his preferred candidate, Sergio Mattarella, a Sicilian judge.

Corrado Formigli, the host of Piazza Pulita, hit back at the premier. “A prime minister has many chances to speak on talkshows. If he doesn’t go, he should avoid intervening from outside,” he told La Repubblica. “The head of government should think about governing. Us journalists will think about doing our job. Our viewers will judge us.”