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The eight o'clock news, and why it matters more than the papers
Italy is a television country in a way that print circulation makes obvious: the largest daily sells a few hundred thousand copies, and the main evening bulletin is watched by millions. The 8pm slot is the national one — TG1 on the first channel, with TG5 on the commercial side and TG3 later and more regional — and for most of the country it is where politics happens. Which makes who controls it a permanent question. The state broadcaster's news divisions have been divided between political blocs since the 1970s under a practice everyone names openly, la lottizzazione, the parcelling-out: TG1 to the governing side, TG3 historically to the left, TG2 somewhere between. Italians know which bulletin they are watching and adjust, exactly as they do with newspapers. The careful vocabulary in this lesson exists because Italy had a bad experience. In the 1990s, during the corruption investigations that dismantled the party system, the avviso di garanzia — a notice intended to protect a suspect by telling them an inquiry existed — started arriving on television before it arrived in the post, and careers ended on the strength of it. The phrase processo mediatico, trial by media, dates from then, and so does the near-ritual insistence on presunto, indagato and avrebbe. Note that the hedging is therefore not timidity. It is the scar tissue of a specific decade, and an Italian viewer hears it as such.