The Truth Society

Science, Disinformation, and Politics in Berlusconi's Italy

Noelle Molé Liston

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501750793
  9781501750786
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501750809
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving.

With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Chapter 1

MANIFEST DISGUISE AND MEDIATIZED POLITICS

There is no one on the world stage who can compete with me.

—SILVIO BERLUSCONI

A head of state that tells jokes everywhere … a [head of state] who would be merely a blemish if he weren’t a national tragedy.

—EUGENIO SCALFARI, “LO STATO DISOSSATO E I PASTICCI ELETTORALI”

Before his resignation in November 2011, Silvio Berlusconi was Italy’s second-longest-serving prime minister; he is the world’s thirty-seventh wealthiest man, a media mogul who owned the majority of Italian television networks and television advertising, and leader of the center-right political party Il popolo della Libertà (Bigi et al. 2011, 151; Benini 2012, 88; Edwards 2005; Ginsborg 2005).¹ His charismatic though scandal-ridden leadership has been a defining part of contemporary Italy since his first government mandate in 1994, so much so that historian David Gilmour has described him as having “a hold over the Italian people as no other politician … since Mussolini” (2011, 380). According to Slavoj Žižek (2009), he manages to fuse “permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism.”² Nicknamed “the Knight” (Il Cavaliere), he has further consolidated his “playboy” image with plastic surgery, hair implants, and candid discussion of his sex drive (Allum 2011, 289).³ For most of his three terms in office, he was the target of judicial proceedings and accusations of criminal misdeeds ranging from tax fraud to corruption to Mafia involvement, and he was infamous for sex-related scandals involving marital infidelity, divorce, and his organization of sex parties with underage prostitutes. On that note, the creator and producer of Italy’s most popular news parody show, Striscia la Notizia (The news is creeping; hereafter, Striscia), had a resonant one-liner for Berlusconi’s sex scandals: “Everyone knows those girls got paid just to listen to his horrible jokes” (Cazzullo 2011).

In addition to his spectacular improprieties, Berlusconi is known for his hilariously awful remarks and public gaffes. Let us review some of his most audacious: calling President Barack Obama “suntanned” (abbronzato; Merlo 2011); suggesting the political party Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale) rename itself “Go Pussy” (Forza Gnocca); gesturing “gimme five” to former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (Messina 2002); telling a German member of the European Parliament that he would be a perfect cinematic Nazi commander (Billig 2005, 177); proclaiming German chancellor Angela Merkel an “unscrewable lardass” (la culona inchiavabile; Telese 2011); uttering to the then president of the European Union Anders Fogh Rasmussen that Rasmussen was “the most beautiful premier in Europe” (Telese 2011); and even quipping, “Mussolini never killed anyone. [He] used to send people on vacation in internal exile” (Allum 2011, 289).

Though Berlusconi has called his style “smile diplomacy” (la diplomazia del sorriso), such comments have gotten him dubbed “Sir Gaffe” (Signore delle Gaffe) and “Al Boorish” (Al Cafone, a play on Al Capone; Messina 2002). And to his critics, he has responded with more jokes, saying, “The communists [have] no sense of humor” (Gilmour 2011, 381).⁴ Whether people find him funny is not my interest. I start from the fact that Berlusconi has crafted himself as humorous and relatable and, despite wide agreement on his ineptitude and moral bankruptcy, has captured broad political support in Italy since 1994. His cumulative years in office make him the longest-serving postwar prime minister.

How can humor, particularly humor made into tidy televised tidbits, serve a political leader who is widely seen as inept? What are the distinguishing features of political satire when a country’s own prime minister is both majority owner of Italian television and the object of ridicule? We might link Italy’s news parody Striscia to the rise across many late-liberal Western democracies of “overidentification” humor, which so genuinely mimics the normative form of discourse that it becomes hard to tell whether it is ridicule or support (Boyer and Yurchak 2010, 181), as well as to “theatrical political activism” (Haugerud 2012, 153). Political humor and satire, particularly in the West, have become more challenging to decipher as polarized political messages are increasingly synchronized and “mediatized” as well as digital (Campus 2010; Boyer 2013a). Viewers, in other words, need to do more imaginative work to figure out that a lavishly dressed and presumably wealthy citizen announcing his or her ardent support of George W. Bush’s tax cuts (Haugerud 2012) or that Stephen Colbert’s testimony to Congress on migrant labor (Boyer and Yurchak 2011) is actually undermining, not endorsing, the position being advocated. Writing on irony, James W. Fernandez and Mary Taylor Huber make the observation that irony can “afford political circumstances where direct dissent is hard to formulate, risky, or unwise” (2001, 5). Pathways to direct dissent may be limited or obfuscated in a variety of ways, through direct censorship of and constraints on media but also through media’s own activities, such that increasingly homogenized political messages are engineered for the public (Baym and Jones 2012; Boyer and Yurchak 2010). Such circumstances fittingly describe Italy in the 1990s and thus inform my analysis of Striscia. However, neither Striscia nor Berlusconi’s own humor can be complexly characterized without a deeper examination of why televised spectacle and satire can be appealing to an Italian citizenry and politically strategic for a head of state. Examining Striscia becomes a way to consider how the material ways in which citizens encountered news media and information became the foundation to Berlusconi’s unique right-wing, patriarchal mediatized political regime.

Figure 1.1. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in Milan in April 2010. Photo by Bruno Cordioli.

Born to a middle-class Milanese family, Berlusconi became a successful entrepreneur who, by 1978, began Fininvest, a holding company of several media channels. Events in 1989 remapped Italian politics: the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) lost stability, finally disbanding in 1994, and the Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano) was dwindling, morphing into the less significant Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS) in 1991 (Allum 2011, 285); the late 1980s marked the end of Italy’s so-called First Republic (1946–92) and signified a slowly loosening hold of Catholicism and Marxism in national discourse (Ginsborg 2005).⁵ This was the crucial moment in which Berlusconi’s new party, Forza Italia (Go Italy, FI), could ally with the right-wing former fascist party National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale, AN) and a separatist party, the Northern League (Lega Nord, LN), and win the 1994 election. By the 2001 elections, Berlusconi had been in and out of office twice, succeeded by four different short-term left-wing leaders; for his reelection campaign in 2001, he distributed his life story, Una storia italiana (An Italian story), to Italian households, presenting himself as a “commonplace man whose ordinary virtues … had made him enormously rich” (Edwards 2005, 226). He returned to office in 2001, and his leadership endured until 2011, interrupted only by the two-year interim of the Olive Tree coalition’s Romano Prodi, a Democrat (May 2006–May 2008). In 2018, he ran as the figurehead of Forza Italia, which did not gain the majority in the March elections. After his ban from Italian politics ended in 2019, he was elected and has served as a member of the European Parliament since July 2019.

Many Italians have been deeply suspicious about how Berlusconi has used the judiciary to favor his business interests. In 2001 he loosened laws on false accounting and reset a statute of limitations to annul several suits against his own company. A 2003 law he enacted saved his television channel Rete 4, and a 2004 law limited media ownership but left his own company, Mediaset, alone (Edwards 2005, 236–237). After his 2008 reelection, he was still embroiled in legal troubles for his involvement with underage prostitutes and more legal maneuvering around his own prosecution. He also had waning popular support. He survived a December 2010 no-confidence motion by only three votes, and he resigned eleven months later (Allum 2011, 281). It is not uncommon to call Berlusconi’s political career an “anomaly” (Edwards 2005, 236). Erik Jones (2009, 39–40) uses “anomaly” because of the rare political circumstances that led to Berlusconi’s rise to power: the concomitant failing of the Christian Democrats, his financial wealth and self-casting as an entrepreneur, his media empire, his ideological focus on “football imagery and anti-communism,” and his charisma.

For some, Berlusconi’s jokes have served an “undemocratic function” in that they foreclose dialogue by supplanting critique with humor (Edwards 2005, 238). Likening humor to the genre of myth, Michael Herzfeld has argued that Berlusconi’s public offenses may “provide a means of suppressing the many inconvenient contradictions inherent in the social order” (2008, 146). Thus, Herzfeld suggests that one might read Berlusconi’s jokes as staging yet simultaneously seeking to dissolve the contradictions surrounding the traditional versus the modern, rationality versus irrationality, or, more aptly, legitimate versus illegitimate governance. For historian Paul Ginsborg, the jokes furthered his “patrimonial authority,” a concept developed from Max Weber’s notion of “patrimonialism” and defined as a “personal, traditional authority [that] became more extended spatially and dependent upon different forms of interpersonal relationships [and] a reciprocity of favours” (2005, 118). Berlusconi, in this view, merges charismatic leadership with the regular manipulation of others’ loyalty and indebtedness in fulfillment of his interests and the consolidation of power; put differently, his jokes serve as a strategic part of his “toxic” leadership, a poison to democratic institutions (Shin and Agnew 2008). His jokes seem to fit with a widely held view of him as a performer: “He is a showman who plays with … the collective imaginary” (Allum 2011, 290). Žižek (2009) concurs: “Behind [Berlusconi’s] clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency.” These appellations—showman, clown—raise the question of what allowed such a figure of spectacle to become intertwined with the position of prime minister.

While concurring with the scholarly consensus that his humor has been significant, I focus here on excavating the cultural and historical conditions that made his techniques possible and effective: How was this curious intermingling of politician and masquerader a creation and function of his mediatized politics? Berlusconi’s humor undergirds his oft-bewildering popularity because it forges ties to an Italian citizenry made cynical by the growing political spectacle of the late twentieth century: the carefully staged and sensational exhibitionism of national politics wrought in the 1980s and, in subsequent decades, the television media takeover of late-liberal politics. Berlusconi’s self-crafted buffoonery, a form of manifest disguise, I suggest, fits well into larger and more deeply entrenched cultural narratives of failed but still charming funnymen and within an ethos of cynicism that valorizes possibly amoral but clever political leaders (Edwards 2005; O’Leary 2010; Watters 2011). I then turn to Antonio Ricci’s news parody program Striscia, broadcast on Berlusconi’s own Mediaset and one of Italy’s most popular shows since it began in 1988 (Ardizzoni 2009; Chu 2012).⁶ The most striking feature of the show is the character Gabibbo, who resembles a sports-team mascot: a human-sized, red puppet with a big mouth and rotund belly who is praised as a “civil defender.” I illustrate how Striscia, especially the puppet Gabibbo, though apparently at odds with Berlusconi’s own humor, is a twin effect: an opposing mode of political humor made possible by the same historical and cultural roots and tied to the technological mode of political communication: television. A few have argued that the show’s programming has moved from a rather irreverent take on social injustices to a focus on gossip and celebrity and that, as a whole, it now remains relatively quiet about Berlusconi-related scandals (Ardizzoni 2009; Cosentino 2012, 58). But this is also what makes the show so vital in understanding Berlusconism: its literal fake news in a television system in which his economic control essentially rendered all of his news programming a form of disinformation.

Unraveling Political Humor and Cynicism

Oppositions and contradictions play a central role in humor, both for theorists (Bakhtin 1984; Douglas 1968; Freud 1990) and within an Italian tradition (Di Martino 2011; Pirandello 1974). On comedic performance, Gilles Deleuze has observed, “By scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity” (1971, 77). It follows, then, that political humor overdoes it: exaggerating political forms reveals the logics that undergird them (Boyer and Yurchak 2010). But humor is also about mockery and derision and, at times, embarrassing and ridiculing its targets. Embarrassing faux pas, Michael Billig (2001) suggests, do not necessarily produce empathy in onlookers, as humor theorists had initially conjectured. Rather, he argues, the enjoyment of such moments derives from their social mismatches, disruptions, or ambiguity (Italians laugh at the appalling distance between a refined political leader and Berlusconi; Billig 2001, 29). In turn, this pleasure is “disciplinary” and reinforces the social order by rendering those who laugh both happily transgressive and compliant (Billig 2005, 176).

The kind of humor disseminated by Berlusconi, I think, relies on a cynical national audience. It stems from a distrustful citizenry that finds amorality in politics to be dismally normal. The cynicism is reciprocal, as Berlusconi’s own humor and political maneuverings exhibit contempt for traditional moral standards. Žižek (2009), for instance, has referred to “[Berlusconi’s] rule through cynical demoralization.” Catherine Fieschi and Paul Heywood have also suggested that cynicism—“a willingness to engage, but with lower expectations”—sustains Berlusconi’s “entrepreneurial populism” (2004, 293). They define this form of populism as a media-heavy right-wing politics with business-based leaders and a less “xenophobic tenor” than “traditional populism,” which is animated not by cynicism but “lack of trust”...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Manifest Disguise and Mediatized Politics
• 2. The Soldiers of Rationality
• 3. The Rise of Algorithm Populism
• 4. The Trial against Disinformation
• 5. Scientific Anesthetization in the Anthropocene
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index