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Silvio Berlusconi Essay

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Silvio Berlusconi is an Italian politician and media tycoon who served three times as Prime Minister of Italy. Berlusconi is the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister if Italy and third longest-serving since Italy’s unification, holding three separate terms. Berlusconi is also the controlling shareholder of Mediaset and owner of A.C. Milan, one of the most successful soccer teams. In 2012, Forbes magazine ranked him as the 169th richest man in the world with a net worth of US$5.9 billion (Forbes).
Berlusconi was born in Milan in 1936 where he was raised there in a middle-class family (Willey). His mother was a housewife and his father was a bank employee. Silvio was the first of three children, where his sister and brother are both …show more content…

In 1978 Berlusconi founded his first media group, Finivest, and in the five years leading to 1983 he earned some 113 billion Italian liras (US$78 billion). The funding sources are still unknown because of the complex system of holding companies that makes them impossible to trace, despite investigations conducted by various state attorneys.
Finivest soon expanded into a country-wide network of local TV stations which had similar programming, forming in effect a single national network. This was seen as breaching the Italian public broadcaster statutory monopoly on creating a national network which was later abolished (Global). In 1980 Berlusconi founded Italy’s first private national network, Canale 5, followed shortly thereafter by Italy 1. Berlusconi was assisted in his successful effort to create the first and only Italian commercial TV empire by his connections to Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party and also prime minister of Italy at that time. Craxi passed an emergence decree legalizing the nationwide transmissions made by Berlusconi’s television stations. After some political turmoil in 1985 the decree was approved definitively but for some years, Berlusconi’s three channels remained in a legal limbo, and were not therefore allowed to broadcast news and political commentary. In 1995 Berlusconi sold a portion of his media holdings to a German media group Kirch Grroup and

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