ABSTRACT
In February 2005, the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT) began running an advertising campaign entitled “Fri Television”. The campaign was designed to highlight that SVT's programming was both free at the point of use and free from political pressure, and included clips of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, implicitly comparing free SVT with un-free media in other countries. The campaign provoked strong reactions – not from Swedish viewers, rather from the Italian government. Sweden's ambassador to Italy was invited to the foreign ministry to explain the situation. At the same time, Italy's ambassador in Stockholm visited the foreign ministry there in order to make clear Italy's demand that SVT stay out of “Italian internal affairs”, a request which Moderate Party parliamentarian Gustav Fridolin likened to “the demand of a dictatorship”. 1 According to deputy foreign minister Laila Freivalds, the government made it clear to the Italian delegation that the government could in no way interfere with SVT's output, 2 and the matter was eventually dropped.
