In June 2002, in Bologna (Italy), OrfeoTV was born and in the following months in various Italian cities street televisions were disseminated, giving life to the Telestreet network. From this activity the book “Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine” was born which has been published in Italy, Spain and soon will be in the United States. The book explains the relations between  political power and the media in Italy in the last decade:

“By means of trickery and illegal operations an economic and advertising group has appropriated for themselves an enormous media-based power, using it without scruples to obtain political power. And this political power has been used to protect and reinforce the interests of this same group. With this the interests of the national community, with respect to the law and to the most elemental norms of coexistence, have been systematically sacrificed.”

On March 8, 2006, in the city of Padua, where the book was printed  for its Italian edition, the authors must appear before a judge in order to respond to the accusation of defamation leveled by Federico  Confalonieri. As the head of Mediaset, feeling himself defamed by the book and considering the interests of his business gravely wounded (interests that, in the stock market, will have supposedly suffered moral and material damage as a result of the book), Confalonieri asked that the authors of said book be prosecuted both criminally and civilly.

This is not the first time that the italian govenment of Mediaset has  put into motion means directed at eliminating free speech. The elimination from television screens of Enzo Biagi, Santoro, Luttazzi, Sabina Guzzanti and many others has already been inscribed in the great book of the universal history of infamy. Now they’re attacking a book that doesn’t deal with secret plots, that doesn’t reveal swindles and deceptions, but that limits itself to articulating a principle: the connection between economic power, media power and political power kills democracy.

The owners of Mediaset and the government, who for years have accused their adversaries of using the legal system against them, now turn to the same system to ask it to prosecute the freedom of expression. Those who for decades have daily gathered together millions of people in front of their uninterrupted emission of brain-clogging electronic signals, bring to the courts the authors of a book that speaks only of non-regulated imagination.

update: Communication concerning the legal proceedings against the authors of "Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine"