The parable of the Cav. is linked to that of his TVs

Silvio Berlusconi created Italian commercial television and its political dimension was forged by that medium. The attempt to separate the entrepreneur Berlusconi from the political Berlusconi is an arduous undertaking, albeit understandable – I myself have tried, even if only to describe the admiration and gratitude towards the former, and the distance from the ideas and behaviors of the latter – but it is a fact that without commercial television, established in Italy by Berlusconi, the political Berlusconi would not have existed, and Italian politics would have been different. This is not for the reason that Cav. was able to use its televisions (or a part of them) to support the famous “descent into the field” and the subsequent electoral campaigns, and not even – or in any case not only – although the Alfa networks had contributed even before 1994 to shape the collective imagination (on this one could open a long reasoning, which I summarize: if it is true that commercial TV has no other editorial purpose than “to give the public what the public wants”, to transform the public into contacts to sell to the advertising market, it is then the audience that shapes TV far more than TV can shape its audience); but for the reason that Marshall McLuhan recorded as early as 1964, namely for the fact that “the medium is the message”. Berlusconi as a politician was what he was, especially in his luckiest season, and Italian politics has profoundly changed, starting from his “descent into the field”, for the reason that commercial television has forged both . I’m talking about TV as a universal and popular medium, daily and mainly feminine, empathetic and dedicated to entertainment.

TV, built to create an audience, (also) shapes politics around its nature, transferring its own vocation and the codes of its own language to it. Commercial TV favors close-ups – therefore the faces of its protagonists, the effectiveness of eye contact – and avoids boring communication. In order to “hold” – to prevent the viewer from changing the channel – it is forced to “hold”, and politics can only comply with this rule. Or rather, there are those who understand it and those who don’t. But who knows and practices it best of all is the man that that “means” has helped to affirm, Silvio Berlusconi.

Was it populism? Perhaps yes, but mainly because the medium had its own laws: disintermediation and personalization, which Berlusconi filled with his irrepressible character. It was the golden age of commercial TV and it was the golden age of politics and that politician, which many were then forced to imitate. Already today, in a context in which generalist TV weighs much less, in a fragmented panorama in which TV is no longer the “egg yolk” and a new medium – social networks – mainly determines the language and the content of the policy, the latter works differently. There is much more volatility than consensus, for example. It is therefore not only due to natural aging – personal and of the model – that Berlusconi has seen his success decline. His political parable, if you pay attention to it, corresponds to that of the medium which owes its success to him and from which it received just as much fortune.