Berlusconi phenomenon
zation. Th is in turn is located in the context of its
industrial or commercial sector and its country
of origin. Each of these contextual factors will,
of course, have an impact on the nature of the
communication activities.
Th e inner circle of the wheel represents the
options available as regards channels of commu-
nication that may be used to reach the designated
publics: advertising, correspondence, point of
sale, public relations, personal presentation,
impersonal presentation, product, literature, and
placement media.
At the outer circle of the wheel are the vari-
ous publics to be reached: the trade, the media,
government, financial, customers, general
public, internal, local, and influential groups.
A message may of course be designed to reach
several publics, and it may be appropriate to
divide them into primary and secondary publics
or audiences.
The wheel can be spun such that the inner
circle can turn within the outer circle to match
channels to publics. Th us the wheel can be used
when planning which types of publics need to be
reached and by what means. Several channels
may be used to reach any one public. In Company
Image and Reality (Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1984) David Bernstein argues that the wheel
is designed to ‘stimulate some fresh thoughts
and encourage the thinker to regard corporate
communications as a totality rather than a series
of discrete messages to discrete audiences’. He
continues, ‘A company needs to take a holistic
view of communication because it is communi-
cating all the time (even if it doesn’t want to or
doesn’t realize it), to all of those nine publics.’
Beveridge Committee Report on Broadcast-
ing, 1950 Both from a theoretical and a practi-
cal point of view, the Committee chaired by Lord
Beveridge conducted the most thorough exami-
nation of broadcasting in Britain since its incep-
tion. Beveridge went to considerable lengths to
identify and discuss the dangers of monopoly,
as then held by the BBC. Nevertheless proposals
for competitive broadcasting were rejected on
the grounds that programmes would deterio-
rate in quality if there were rival corporations.
Beveridge was equally firm in believing that
broadcasting should be independent of govern-
ment control, and declared against suggestions
that the power of the BBC should be curbed
through closer parliamentary supervision.
To prevent broadcasting becoming an uncon-
trolled bureaucracy, Beveridge recommended
more active surveillance of output by the BBC’s
Board of Governors and a ‘Public RepresentationBerlusconi phenomenon Te r m u s e d b y
Gianpietro Mazzoleni in ‘Towards a “Videoc-
racy”? Italian political communication at a
turning point’ in the European Journal of
Communication, September 1995, to describe
the remarkable entry into politics, and election
to Prime Minister of Italy in March 1994, of
the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. Mazzoleni
identifi es a number of interconnected factors
that led to Berlusconi’s success in forming a
political party, Forza Italia, and in less than fi fty
days of electioneering, displacing the traditional
duopoly of political power in Italy (the Christian
Democrats and the Communists).
Forza was essentially the party of commercial-
ization and it won popularity because Berlus-
coni, the media man, calculated the needs of
the nation’s electorate-as-audience. Because of
his dominant control of commercial TV in Italy,
Berlusconi has been able to provide himself with
the kind of ‘tame press’ every politician dreams
of.
However, Mazzoleni is of the opinion that to
attribute Berlusconi’s electoral success solely to
his media power is a short-sighted reading of
the complexity of the Berlusconi phenomenon.
Rather his message, greatly aided by the power to
communicate it across the nation, ‘was success-
ful because it found several ears ready to listen to
it’. Further, Berlusconi understood perhaps more
clearly than any other media mogul that today’s
elections are not only fought out on the televi-
sion screen, but are also about grabbing popular
attention by combining the emotive with the
entertaining.
Though Berlusconi’s first premiership was
short-lived – he resigned offi ce within months
- it set agendas for the future of political
communication; and to prove that his electoral
success was not a fl ash in the pan, Berlusconi
was returned to offi ce in the Italian elections of
2001, narrowly defeated in 2006 but restored to
power in the election of April, 2008. His posi-
tion as Prime Minister has allowed him indirect
control over state broadcasting.
Berlusconi’s reputation for womanizing and
controversial statements seemed to do his popu-
larity with the Italian public no harm – until
Italy’s Eurozone fi nancial crisis in the autumn
of 2011 forced his resignation. See topic guide
under media: ownership & control.
Bernstein’s wheel, 1984 Refers to a model
designed by David Bernstein to aid the planning
of an organization’s communication activities,
for example public relations and associated
activities. At the hub of the wheel is the organi-