Even while on holiday in Tuscany, the phone-hacking revelations translate perfectly
Any hope that a holiday in Italy would offer an escape from the phone-hacking scandal obsessing the British media was quickly dashed, for the Italian media seems hardly less obsessed. The Italian newspapers have devoted huge amounts of space to what they call "Tabloid-gate" or "Murdoch-gate". Rebekah Brooks ? referred to as "the Red Gorgon" or "the Tabloid Dominatrix" or "Murdoch's Medusa" ? has replaced Pippa Middleton as probably the most famous Englishwoman in Italy, and Wendi Deng, Murdoch's "guardian angel", is presently the most famous woman of any nationality. Why should the Italians be so excited?
One reason is that this is a very Italian kind of scandal, one involving allegations of corruption in high places, of cover-ups, of feminine wiles, and ? the essential ingredient of any good Italian scandal ? a baffling death (or one that can at least be presented as baffling). The British police may have found nothing fishy about Sean Hoare's demise, but a headline in La Repubblica read "The Mysterious End of Sean, the 'Deep Throat' of Journalism". It is all most comfortingly familiar.
Another reason for the Italian fascination is the many perceived parallels with the case of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon (and, of course, prime minister). The distinguished Italo-American writer and journalist Alexander Stille cited among them in La Repubblica "the unhealthy relations between politics and the media, and the utterly disproportionate power exerted by a single man, who can make and destroy political leaders, who can create scandals and then make them disappear". Like Murdoch, Berlusconi is also suffering from a loss of authority, as exemplified this week by a vote in parliament to lift immunity from one of his parliamentary supporters and have him sent for trial on corruption charges.
He also mentioned the Italian telecom scandal of five years ago, in which some 5,000 people were allegedly victims of illegal wiretapping; and the "Boffo case", in which Dino Boffo, the 72-year-old editor of Italy's main Catholic newspaper, was persecuted and driven to resignation by the Berlusconi press after he attacked the prime minister's supposedly heartless attitude to the plight of African immigrants to Italy. Stille likened this to the revenge habitually wreaked by the Murdoch media on people who get in his way. The hatred of Berlusconi in the Italian liberal press is reflected in its attitude to Rupert Murdoch, who is routinely known as "the Shark".
To these elements may be added the schadenfreude that Italians may feel when a country such as Britain, boastful of its integrity, finds itself suffering from an Italian-style corruption scandal. They are especially delighted to learn about the excesses of the British press, though I cannot help noticing that Italian newspapers, even if greater respecters of privacy than ours, can be rather more slapdash: the country's most respected paper, Corriere della Sera of Milan, managed to describe the head of the Metropolitan Police as "Sir Patrick Stevenson", "Sir Paul Stevenson" and "Sir Paul Stephenson" in just one article this week.
But that said, the Italians have a longstanding reverence for British institutions that they are loath to give up. They even find evidence of British democratic maturity in the present shambles. Vittorio Zuccone, La Repubblica's Washington correspondent, began an article on the affair by saying that "the global press and television tycoon has finally had to bow before the sovereignty of British democracy ? Rupert Murdoch, the shark, has been transformed into a tuna caught in the net of popular indignation".
In Britain, as opposed to Italy, wrote Stille, both politicians and the public had shown themselves willing to curb the power of an overweening media mogul. Furthermore, executives of News International had been arrested and police chiefs made to resign, whereas "in Italy many perhaps more serious scandals have remained unpunished". Paradoxically, we seem to be emerging from this scandal with our reputation somewhat enhanced.
Hair and humility
Much has been made of Rebekah Brooks's hair (which in the way it stands out sideways from the head reminds me less of Medusa than of a Vel�squez Infanta), and it occurred to me that Rupert Murdoch might have a thing about long hair, given that his wife, the heroic Wendi, is the possessor of one very long tress. But then it was pointed out to me that nowadays all fashionable women have long hair, including the Duchess of Cambridge and her sister and, as it so happens, the Conservative MP for Corby, Louise Mensch.
Mensch, as a member of the House of Commons media committee interrogating Murdoch, was forced to apologise for quoting him as saying that this was the most "humiliating" day of his life. What he had actually said was that it was the most "humble", which was rather different. But one can't really blame Mensch for the slip, for days can't be humble, only people can; and the authors of this carefully prepared soundbite should be ashamed of themselves for getting Murdoch to utter it. As it is, every paper in Italy translated "humble" as "umiliante", meaning "humiliating", and I would be surprised if something similar hadn't happened in most countries. For you can't expect such illiteracy to survive in translation. As a consequence, Murdoch really has been humiliated, which was not what he intended to say at all.
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