The Italian premier has attacked the domestic and international media for months, suing two left-leaning Italian newspapers for millions of euros (dollars) and denouncing "scoundrels" in the press.

Berlusconi says he wants to protect his image and that of his country, but to critics he just wants to gag the media. A recent press freedom rally in Rome drew tens of thousands of people, some holding signs saying "Now Sue Me, Too!"

What makes the issue especially sensitive in Italy is Berlusconi's very concentration of media power.

Through holding company Fininvest, Berlusconi and his family own the country's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset; the largest publishing house, Mondadori, which prints news weeklies and gossip magazines; and his brother owns the conservative paper Il Giornale.

As head of government, Berlusconi has indirect control over state broadcaster RAI. Together, RAI and Mediaset account for about 90 of free channels in Italy.

"Italy is a media democracy. Consensus is built through the media, especially TV, glossy magazines and lowbrow newspapers, which belong to the person who runs this country," said Concita De Gregorio, the editor of L'Unita, one of the newspapers sued by Berlusconi.

"There's a power to intimidate, blackmail, threaten that acts sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly," she said in an interview with APTN.

The battle with the press is only one of the fronts Berlusconi has been fighting: Already dogged by a sex scandal over his encounters with young women, the premier faces two trials in Milan after an immunity law was overturned last month. And his holding company was ordered to pay a huge amount of money _ ⁈llion, or about $1 billion _ to a rival in a decade-old civil case.

Berlusconi has dismissed the accusations of media interference as a "joke" and the rally as a "farce." He says Italy has more press freedom than any other Western country and he's just protecting himself from slander.

"They mean freedom of the press as the freedom to mystify, insult, slander, tell lies," Berlusconi said recently in a phone call to a Mediaset TV show. "This isn't freedom of the press and if anything is at risk in Italy today is the right to privacy of all citizens."

The premier sued L'Unita, as well as Repubblica, for articles related to the sex scandal, for about ⁈ion ($5.8 million) combined, according to the papers. He informed reporters that his government would not answer questions over the scandal.

Berlusconi recently accused foreign journalists of besmirching his government and the whole of Italy. His minister for tourism announced an initiative aimed at monitoring the foreign press and "distributing positive information of our country."

Before an astounded Spanish premier, Berlusconi weeks ago attacked the respected Spanish newspaper El Pais, which has published risque photos of parties at the premier's villa. The premier has also accused Rupert Murdoch, once a business ally, of mounting a campaign against him after some articles in the Murdoch-owned Times of London.

Reporters Without Borders has put Italy in 49th place _ down five positions _ in its annual ranking of media freedom, citing among other things Berlusconi's "harassment of the media." The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has appealed to the premier to drop the lawsuits, saying that "public officials should tolerate a higher level of criticism than ordinary citizens."

Washington-based advocacy group Freedom House says Italy's media is only "partly free," amid increased intimidation and concerns over the concentration of ownership.

Italy's media have always been highly politicized, with newspapers and TV often serving the interests and money behind them. The country's leading financial newspaper, for example, is owned by the business lobby, Confindustria, and that has led to questions over its independence.

And despite Berluconi's dominance, there is an abundance of voices in any newsstand, some ferociously anti-Berlusconi.

"The news goes around in millions of ways," says Gianluca Nicoletti, a radio host and media observer. "If Italian citizens believe that being informed is a primary need, they can be informed at little cost: they have sources, opinions and as many competing positions as one could imagine."

Still, Berlusconi's grip on TV is especially worrisome to some observers.

According to media watch group Osservatorio Carlo Lombardi, nearly 90 percent of the Italian population watch TV at least three times a week, making it their primary source of information. Over 9 million people, or 17.8 of the adult population, say they never read a newspaper.

In a recent example that has angered Berlusconi's critics, a Mediaset show filmed the judge who had ordered Fininvest to pay the $1-billion damages, poking fun at him as he strolled around the city doing mundane tasks.

"This government has a virtually complete control over news that is released via TV," said Fabrizio Perretti, a media expert and professor at Milan's Bocconi University, citing the lack of proper coverage of the scandal in several national newscasts. "The power of TV is huge."