In which we learn Italian profanities

Beppe Grillo's hand gesture is not sign language for "Vaffanculo." (I checked.)

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi looks a little uncomfortable. Is it media unrest or heartburn?

Thousands of angry Italians congregated to demand media reform in their country today, led by anti-political comedian Beppe Grillo.

The rally participants christened their protest "V-day." Not "v" as in "Valentine," or the kind of thing Eve Ensler talks about all the time, but as in "Vaffanculo!" I will not tell you what that means because this is a class blog, not a slam book of slurs and cusses, but if you're dying to know, Reuters explains it here.

Grillo ranted and raved to a crowd of at least 45,000 supporters against Berlusconi's media monopolization, comparing Berlusconi's ownership to a hypothetical Barack Obama owning Fox, ABC, and other television networks. Berlusconi owns Mediaset and exerts a good deal of control over RAI, the Italian national network, "indirectly controlling" up to ninety percent of Italian television audiences.

Berlusconi claims there's no real conflict of interest and that the leftwing media attacks him regularly, poor guy.

Blogger-comedian Grillo devised a petition to revoke the Gasparri law, a form of extreme media deregulation that limited competition and enabled Berlusconi's Mediaset to expand digitally.

While he brings up a lot of legitimate points, it seems Grillo's a tad off on the Obama comparison. If Berlusconi is complaining about being attacked by liberal media personnel, I think a better analogy would be "Rupert Murdoch running every network as well as the country." Thank Heaven he wasn't born in America, otherwise we might have a media mogul running for president.

I think a good alternative for the Italian people would be to quit watching TV and just YouTube everything. Screw political discourse--do you really think Berlusconi's networks will bring the Italian people anything like that Numa Numa guy?

*By Jessica Sager, who speaks fluent "Fritalian."

Will Someone Please Give Me The Story?

The War In Iraq has really become the War in America's Propagandist Media.

CNN and Fox News are doing their best to show me two extreme ideologies that are bad for America.

Let's start with CNN. Today's big story on their Inernational page is the battle in Baghdad's Sadr City. They talk about how a U.S. airstrike killed 10 and injured 17. Of course it implies later that those killed were terrorists because the bombing was a precision bombing and no civilians were killed. But the wording is so skewed that I almost feel as though they are making the military look like they are just in Iraq killing civilians for fun.

Then we have Fox. They don't even report this strike on their site, but they do post this story on a suicide bomber killing 4 in Mosul, a story CNN must have missed.

This is rediculous. Both sides completely leaving out stories that matter, and when they find an issue they like, they are quick to change it around so that it matches their ideology.

-Andrew Young