Pannella & Pallone. TeleRoma56’s Glocal Broadcasting between Politics and Entertainment

The paper examines the history of Italy’s local television through the case study provided by TeleRoma56, namely Rome’s first over-the-air local tele-vision. In particular, we explore how, through its dual focus on sport and politics, TeleRoma56 combined its commercial exigencies with the strong po-litical characterization of its television programming, constantly presenting its broadcasting as a public service to the citizens. As a result, TeleRoma56’s his-torical trajectory defies conventional narratives on Italian commercial broad-casting in the course of the 1980s. Conversely to the tendency to interpret Italian private TV as a de-politicized “dream television,” TeleRoma56 prior-itized news and political content over entertainment. At the same time, it provided a laboratory to experiment with sportscasting TV formats that mixed commercial and political exigencies. As such, it offers a simultaneously para-digmatic and exceptional case study to re-think our understanding of the his-tory of Italian private television in the transition from RAI’s public monopoly over TV broadcasting to the liberalization of the Italian television landscape.