Last year on 12 November the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi resigned after losing his majority and public support.

While no longer Prime Minister, he continues to control one half of the countries terrestrial TV market and his company Media Set is a big player in the print and advertising sectors. What will Berlusconi's influence be and will he still be able to shape the agenda through his party and media ownership?

We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss the future of the media in Italy.How will the channels he owns fair now he doesn't have a hand in legislative decisions that affect them and what control will he wield over state funded channels? 

Join us to discuss the future of his media empire and the prospects of Italy or the EU bringing in legislation to break up his media empire and prevent such a monopoly existing? 

With:

Paolo Mancini, professor at Dipartimento Istituzioni e Società, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia. His scientific interests are focused on political communication and more generally on the relationship between politics and communication. While at the Reuters Institute Mancini is working on a project trying to interpret under a new light the political adventure of Silvio Berlusconi and to place it within the new forms that political participation is undertaking in different parts of the world.

John Peet, Europe editor of the Economist, previously he was business affairs editor. Prior to this he had been Brussels correspondent, executive editor, surveys editor, finance correspondent, Washington DC correspondent and Britain correspondent. Before joining The Economist he was a civil servant, working for the Treasury and the Foreign Office from 1976 to 1986.

Gianpietro Mazzoleni, professor of sociology of communication and of political communication at the University of Milan, Italy, where he coordinates the post-graduate courses in communication in the Faculty of Political Sciences. He is member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of Communication and of Political Communication and editor of the Italian scholarly journal Comunicazione Politica. His research interests focus especially on media policies and political communication.

Damian Tambini, senior lecturer in the department of media and communications at LSE and convenor of the MSC in Communication Regulation and Policy.  He is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), at the Oxford Internet Institute and at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. He co-edited Cyberdemocracy and Citizenship, Markets, and the State. Other recent and forthcoming publications include: Nationalism in Italian Politics, New News: Impartial Broadcasting in the Digital Age, Privacy and the Media and Codifying Cyberspace.

Tickets cost £12.50. Please buy your own ticket by following the link http://www.frontlineclub.com/crm/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=627

We'll contnue the debate in the Fronline bar on the first floor AFTER the event.

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