Das Fernsehen, die RAI und die Parteien. Der Primat der Politik in der Geschichte von Rundfunk und Fernsehen in Italien

This paper investigates the relationship between the broadcasting system and the overall political system, which developed in Italy in 1950s and 60s, i.e. the institutions, the parties, and the various political cultures present in the society’s social fabric. Indeed, the roots of the currently much-discussed Italian «television issue» lie far in the past, when the Democrazia Cristiana was in power and the broadcasting service was a RAI monopoly. It was then that—amidst polemics, conflicts, and attempts at reform—the «supremacy of politics» consolidated itself, which was to characterize all of the history of Italian television. The Democrazia Cristiana, which recognized the new mass medium’s potential for creating political consensus and forging a new «national culture» long before the other parties, developed an efficient pedagogic strategy, which certainly bore abundant fruit. Only to get stuck in its strategy when—by the early 1970s—both the political equilibrium and the demands as well as the Italian spectators’ level of «maturity» had changed.