Milo Infante Leaves Rai for Mediaset After Pay and Promotion Dispute

He says stalled promotion talks plus salary limits at the state broadcaster prompted him to accept a director role at Mediaset, a shift that underlines tensions over pay caps and management at public television.

Overview

Infante ended a 22-year career at Rai after saying he repeatedly asked for a promotion, the leadership of Rai’s Struttura Sviluppo Nuovi Format, and higher pay but received verbal promises with no follow-up.
In a published interview he disclosed a Rai salary of €174,280 and said Rai later proposed an external-contract counteroffer reportedly worth €500–600k; those figures are his claims and have not been independently verified.
He says he emailed Paolo Corsini to say he felt free to look elsewhere, then met Mediaset’s Mauro Crippa, described an immediate rapport, and accepted a directorial role at the private broadcaster.
Infante criticized a replacement’s Instagram poster that used AI with the presenter’s face, called the image 'a bit sad,' and offered an apology to colleague Paolo Stasi in the course of the interview.
The episode points to a wider fault line in Italian TV between Rai’s pay ceilings and promotion rules and Mediaset’s hiring power, which could intensify debate over external contracts, editorial decisions, and the ethical use of synthetic media.