Emilio Fede

Emilio Fede is a well-known Italian anchorman, often accused of partizanship in favour of the owner of his own TV station, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Early years

He started his career in the public broadcasting company RAI in the early 1950s, and went on to become one of the most popular faces in the news broadcast. In the 1980s he left RAI (he later claimed he had been purged for political reasons).

Director of TG4

He returned later as the director of the news in Rete 4, a channel of the private Mediaset conglomerate, owned by current Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The newscast was named TG4.

Emilio Fede is known to be a die-hard Berlusconi fan, and his strongly biased news can hardly be called journalism by any serious standard. Even Berlusconi, who often purports that even his own media are "infiltrated by the communist left", has admitted that Fede is biased, saying that "[Fede] loves him". Emilio Fede, once a Juventus supporter, has even become a supporter of AC Milan, whose Berlusconi is owner and president; changes in the supported football team are arguably rarer among Italians than changes of gender, and Fede's defection was mocked for a long time.

TG4 is often presented by Emilio Fede himself, and gives large attention to politics. He invariably sides with Berlusconi, and sometimes pretends he does not remember the names of his political adversaries (as with Francesco Rutelli), or uses the worst available pictures when talking about them (as with Romano Prodi). He has also insulted movie director Nanni Moretti during the news. The news is skewed, filtered and interpreted, with very little separation, if any, between facts and Fede's own opinion; in short, TG4 cannot be considered a serious journalistic broadcast by any stretch of the term, but resebles more political propaganda.

Emilio Fede has some supporters in the public, especially among middle-aged and elderly ladies (the target group of the TV channel), who may remember him from when he used to work in RAI and was very popular. It is notable that some people watch TG4 only for the sake of entertainment, because of the blatant skewness of it and the lengths Emilio Fede often goes to put Berlusconi in a good light, no matter the situation.

While the political section of the news is definitely not objective, other topics are not immune from manipulation. In one occasion, just before an election, the weather forecast of TG4 was the only one to predict widespread rain. It has been alleged that this was done deliberately, to avoid people leaving for the weekend and not going to vote, thinking that Berlusconi voters were for some reason more likely to leave than others.

Prior to recent legislation, Rete4 had been broadcasting illegally for almost a decade, occupying the frequencies belonging to another TV station, that could never start broadcasting (and likely never will). The broadcasting signal was however never shut down because of the political frictions it would have caused with Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia. Recent changes passed by Mr Berlusconi's majority have resolved this problem, allowing for Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset group to hold their dominant market share.

Fede engaged in a strong campaign to avoid transferring Rete 4 to satellite broadcast, showing employees of the station entering the building in the morning and purporting that their jobs would have been lost if Rete 4 had not been made legal.