Italy power shift gives Murdoch leg up

January 02, 2007 Italy is starting to look like most of the rest of the world for News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch: fertile territory ripe for conquest. For years, the lucrative Italian television market had been the personal playground of billionaire media kingpin Silvio Berlusconi, who commanded the airwaves from his dual perch as the head of broadcasting giant Mediaset and as the country's prime minister. [...] a series of events starting with Berlusconi's razor-thin defeat to Romano Prodi in April and continuing with the passage of a new media law designed to control Mediaset's power have opened the door for Murdoch's Italian subsidiary, Sky-Italia, to gain a major foothold in the formerly impenetrable market.

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