“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth,” wrote George Orwell in his famous work 1984 “’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” Orwell’s novel, written in 1949, most obviously referred to the Soviet Union; he could not have imagined a near-totalitarian control of the press taking place in a Western democracy, yet decades after his book a media baron, Silvio Berlusconi, took power in Italy, using his stations to augment and reinforce his power.

On this day, October 3, in 2009, a crowd of thousands, mostly students and workers in the 20s and 30s, descended on central Rome to protest Berlusconi’s attempts to silence the remnants of his media opposition.

As a private entity, Berlusconi went on to control three of Italy’s seven main television channels. A further three being owned by the state-run public-service broadcaster RAI, which is beholden to a pro-Berlusconi parliament. Additionally, Berlusconi became owner of Il Giornale, a major Italian daily paper, as well as a weekly news magazine and the country’s biggest publishing house. What little criticism from independent sources he received, he responded to by libel lawsuit: the prostest in Rome was sparked by a €1m ($1.5m) suit against La Repubblica for the publication of ten questions about his private life, and €2m from L’Unita (plus €200,000 apiece from five named journalists) for a series of critical articles.