Giavazzi probably surprised many by putting the elimination of Italy’s licensing of journalists in his top five. Licensing is what it amounts to, for an aspiring journalist must belong to the Ordine dei giornalisti in order to work. Giavazzi added that he thought this reform would be the hardest of all to implement (because it would get no press support?).

The problems, both actual and potential, of the Italian media are manifold, as they are in the U.S., but the particular Italian approach to managing them is the same one used, to cite an example we will discuss in the future, as medicine for the magistracy. In Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera, Doctor Dulcamara comes to town peddling an elixir that is the perfect medicine for everything and everybody, from paralitici to apopletici. In the Italian political culture, the elixir-for-all-seasons is the writing of laws and rules. That happens in all countries, including the lawyer-ridden U.S., but the Italian zeal for legislating exceeds the others. This same thirst for tidiness is, unfortunately, not used to clean up the old laws rendered useless or inane by the new laws, with the consequence that, political scientists tell us, the books of statutes in effect in Italy, and presumably enforceable, are thicker by far than elsewhere in the West.
So how does one deal with an Italian press that, without restraints, might be too unruly? For starters, you license journalists, with an exam for entry, an exam whose administration raises doubts. Then you write muscular defamation laws and have them enforced by prosecutors and judges who come from the same professional pool of magistrates (even after the reforms). And you struggle, a little too late, to legislate against the grouping of too many media outlets in too few hands.
My hunch is that what was behind Giavazzi’s answer to Vaccara was the belief, shared by all the hardier lovers of democracy, that unruliness is precisely what one wants in the press, especially the political press. That a free-swinging press arena brings with it a measure of yellow journalism is a small price to pay for the great virtue of disorder. And, in fact, the reason why the Italian press remains valuable and interesting is not the mountain of laws and lawsuits; it’s the simple fact that there a lot of newspapers and magazines. Experience throughout the West shows that the most effective barrier against journalism so bad that it wreaks damage is the presence of other newspapers to talk back to venal, corrupt, ideologized or incompetent counterparts, their competition at the edicola [newsstand].
So we saw the spectacle, during the last few days, of the licensed journalists of Corriere della Sera reporting the willful murder of Nicola Calipari as a fact rather than an accusation at the start of a judicial process. The same style was used in the reporting (by licensed journalists) of the more prominent case of fresh bribery charges against the Prime Minister, based on one more instance of the receipt by that newspaper of supposedly-confidential magistracy documents.
The particular problem of the public face that magistrates (themselves hand-cuffed by order-loving rule-makers) are allowed to present will be treated next week, if defamation suits don’t catch up to us.