Panorama (Italian magazine)

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Panorama is a right wing Italian newsmagazine. It was founded in 1962, and is currently owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi via Mondadori, the largest Italian publishing house. It is one of the two most prominent Italian weeklies, with a diffusion of 300.000, the other being L'Espresso. Maurizio Belpietro is its current director (succeeding to Pietro Calabrese) and Paolo Madron, Rita Pinci and Luciano Santilli its vice-directors. Former director of Panorama, Carlo Rossella, is now director of TG5, after having replaced Enrico Mentana in 2004. Curiously, Panorama also publishes articles by The Economist, which has criticized several times Berlusconi.

[edit] Iraq War controversy

In 2002, Panorama played a prominent role in the run-up to the war against Iraq in Italy. In its edition of September 12, 2002, in an article entitled, La guerra è cominciata, writer Pino Buongiorno penned a scoop claiming that Saddam Hussein had imported 500 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium, which had been heisted from a nuclear storage facility in the former Soviet Union.

In October of the same year, reporter Elisabetta Burba was approached by Rocco Martino, who sold her the Yellowcake forgery. It was Burba who then turned the forgeries over to the Embassy of the United States in Rome.