RTE Business - TG4 independent from next year

Ireland follows the Australian route of providing two (linguistically differentiated) public service broadcasters, as TG4 becomes independent from RTE. Concern for RTE must be that (visibly, incontrovertibly) non-commercial, public service remits are not cherry-picked from RTE, leaving the rump service poorly placed to defend funding through compulsory licence fee.

Technorati Tags: rte, tg4, sbs, language, psb

Sveriges Television

I'm hoping to include Sveriges Television as one of my cases in my PhD. I had thought that Nordic stoicism might make SVT less interesting than, say, Rai or RTVE. Not if Rapport keeps putting out news like this it won't be.

Technorati Tags: sveriges+television, svt

Incredible data-mining project on US Senate

Ars Technica has a fascinating report on a major data-mining project involving the Congressional Record. The project uses an unsupervised learning program to automatically code several million speeches as one of forty (automatically generated) categories. The authors show some interesting variation in agenda salience over time demonstrating this method, suggesting that the method is attuned to fluctuations. The model could be relatively easily ported to other languages, including Italian, as long as one has a program to 'stem' the words so as to populate the vocabulary matrix.

Technorati Tags: data+mining, US, Senate, Hansard, agenda, salience

Osservatorio di Pavia

The media observatory in Pavia regularly collects info on politicians' time on screen on all Rai channels. Recently, it seems that certain on the right have been complaining about an absence of Berlusconi from Rai's screens. Mauro Mazza, director of Tg2 - not, I would have thought, a committed centre-left supporter - says some pretty sane things which show up the weakness of existing attempts to monitor political bias:

"To maintain that we're against Berlusconi is like saying that Il Tempo is for Prodi. In the same way that Il Tempo publishes lots of photos of the Prime Minister; - but it does it with caricature, or highlighting his errors. By this I mean that it's not important how long we speak about a politician for, but rather the manner in which we do so.... the data [from Pavia] need to be interpreted, they're not the Gospel".

Technorati Tags: monitoring, bias, content+analysis, mazza, tg2, rai

Prodi government status report

Quick update on the health of the Prodi coalition:

• The Camera has approved the executive's mini-budget. It goes tomorrow to the Senate, where it will again be the subject of a vote of confidence
• The government has already used votes of confidence on seven separate legislative items in three months (according to an interview with Gianfranco Fini); the Berlusconi II government used 29 votes of confidence in four years.
• The frequent use of this device has been criticised both by those on the right as on the left; even Romano Prodi has apologised in part.
• The confidence vote is not always certain to succeed given either (a) particularly strong preferences about a particular issue, or (b) a cock-up; moreover, its use strains relationships between executive and parliamentary majority, exacerbating the situation
• Scenting this weakness, some within the centre-right - in particular, Casini and Fini - have offered an 'understanding' on the passage of this year's budget

Technorati Tags: prodi, government, coalition, majority, vote+of+confidence

Prodi lives to fight another day

Two sighs of relief for the Prodi government. First, the Senate approves the Italian mission to Afghanistan after the government made it a vote of confidence. Second, the Camera approves by the required two-thirds majority amnesties for certain crimes - and the minister who opposed it, Antonio Di Pietro, doesn't resign.

Members of the centre-right had left the Senate to deprive the centre-left of the quorum; immediately after the vote, they complained that the quorum had been calculated incorrectly. As Altero Matteoli explains,

"There are 322 senators; 4 were on mission, so the total goes down to 318, half of which is 159. So there wasn't the legal number, that's 160 [50% + 1]".

Marini explained however that "to the 159 present one always adds the non-voting President - there's no doubt about it".

Although the centre-left won this vote, 16 senators from six parties (Verdi, PRC, PDCI, SVP, IdV, DS) defected on other provisions of the bill. It remains to be seen whether these sixteen will form a future 'awkward squad'.

Technorati Tags: Prodi, government, majority, infight, Senate, confidence

More Thompson replies to politician's queries

More Axegrinder 21.07.06 | Press Gazette: "BBC director general Mark Thompson put his foot in it with a Labour MP during his appearance in Westminster last week. Thompson was being assailed by MP Mike Hall about a BBC programme called The Secret Policeman, which, in Hall's words, used 'criminal elements' in its production.

'If you'd care to write to me about it,' Thompson told the whingeing MP.

Hall (steam shooting from his ears): 'I did write to you! I had an extensive correspondence with you!'"