“I am surprised there is this 25 percent, probably they don’t read the papers and don’t watch TV,” Fabrizio Bertot said.
He added that there are two major financial groups in Italy that control majority shares in both television channels and newspapers.
“The editors belong to [these] financial groups, so they are obviously under a form of control,” the former member of the European Parliament said. He clarified that this “control does not mean that they receive specific orders.”
“The control starts from the beginning, I assume the ideas of the directors and their journalists are in line. So it is not a forced control, but a control that is well-organized from within,” Bertot stressed.
ICM Research surveyed over 8,200 people in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United States on May 1-4, 2015.
