Berlusconi 'sued papers to defend press freedom'

Rome: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he was compelled to sue newspapers which oppose him politically to defend freedom of the press.

Italian journalists and opposition parties are staging a protest "to defend freedom of information" in Rome on September 19 after Berlusconi last week sued the country's largest opposition-aligned newspapers for libel. Berlusconi said it was "a joke of this minority of communists and Catholic-communists" that Italian press freedom is under threat.

The opposition's idea of press freedom "is the freedom to mystify, to insult, and to slander, and so I was forced to turn to the courts to defend the important principle of freedom of the press", Berlusconi said yesterday in an interview on Canale 5, one of the television channels he owns.

"If there's a danger" to freedom, he said, it's from press "attacks on people's private lives".

Berlusconi, 72, is embroiled in a scandal involving a self-proclaimed call girl and is in the midst of his second divorce. He has been plagued by media coverage at home and abroad of his private life for the past three months.

Berlusconi, while critical of the press, is the country's single-largest media owner.

He owns Mediaset SpA, Italy's largest private broadcaster, and influences the state-owned RAI SpA network as premier. The prime minister's brother, Paolo Berlusconi, owns a controlling stake in il Giornale newspaper and his wife Veronica Lario is the largest shareholder of il Foglio, a conservative editorial newspaper. Berlusconi's Fininvest SpA holding company controls Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, the country's biggest magazine publisher.

Allegations of a sex scandal have been fuelled by the claims of Patrizia D'Addario, who calls herself a prostitute. She said she spent the night with Berlusconi on November 4 and was promised a political favour in return. Berlusconi has denied paying for sex or holding "immoral" parties at his homes in Rome and Sardinia.

On July 22, after the scandal had been the subject of media coverage for more than a month, Berlusconi proclaimed: "I'm no saint."