italian tv news and commercials

tele-journalism in italy

...is appalling. Here again it seems to be a question of low budgets - International on-the-spot news-reporting is rarely filmed by an Italian staff member of the network news-team - instead you usually get syndicated reels of video footage shot by CNN or some other American, German or British outfit, and the Italians dub their own story over it, complete with their own flatulent strand of sensationalism. Every snip of hard news they can buy in from the world's news agencies is coloured over with Italian innuendo, speculation, and pseudo-intellectual political comment. Italian newspapers are in a word, partisan, and Italian TV news programmes are partisan with wings on. To fill transmission time during a weak news show, often the same thirty second sequence of news footage is looped and run two or three times over while the presenter spews his verbal speculation over the top of it.
Not only that, but news programmes in particular are shoddily produced - Italians cannot do sound. Even in the same TV news-studio where the same reporter has sat on the same set reading the news into the same microphone year after year, microphone levels will peak and dip atrociously - it's hardly worth buying a hi-fidelity sound TV here, because you will only hear with increased clarity the echo, hiss or hum of badly set up microphones on not just news programmes but most studio-based productions on Italian TV. Sometimes sound is lost altogether for minutes on end; We haven't experienced problems like this on British TV for over thirty years.
We've said that international newsreel footage is rarely shot by Italian crews, however, they do shoot the domestic stuff themselves - But it's appalling - long pans that whizz fast and slope down diagonally from right to left or vice versa, or shake up and down as the camera pans - irrelevant cutaways, blackouts and line dropouts - They just don't care one single jot about the quality of the finished product.

tv commercials in italy

The strong Roman Catholic tradition in Italy means that images of priests and devils and angels are continually wheeled out to promote brands of coffee, cheese and pantyhose in TV advertising. In England or the States either through a strengthening of the protestant moral majority bible-belt right or the inverse swing of a culturally sophisticated amoral left, we can no longer be pushed by these old buttons, and our ad agencies know it, but Italian advertisers continue with these (to us) now embarrassingly archaic symbols of good, bad and naughty but nice.
There's also a lot of precocious kids troughing yoghurt and fancy bread rolls, and a lot of venerable old grandfathers telling the grandchildren that So and So Inc's pasta tastes nearly as good as the stuff his own grandmamma used to make in Naples. There's also a lot of MTV generation stuff, hairspray and mobile phone ads with techno soundtracks and the usual sickly car ads with those pretentious opera soundtracks that have also sadly plagued the rest of the world, but mostly it's this domestic 1920s Sicilian village 'priest in the olive-grove' nostalgia rubbish that's employed to reassure the Italian commercial watcher of the must-have qualities of a product.
They also advertise a lot of cheese as if it was the greatest thing on earth. I am not convinced.

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