Milan, Sept. 22 (Reuters): An irreverent Internet site crammed with pornography has Italy?s elite squirming with unease.

When Italians want details of anything from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi?s cosmetic surgery to society weddings and boardroom feuds, they click on www.dagospia.com.

Set up by disc-jockey-turned-journalist Roberto D?Agostino, Dagospia is scoured by policy makers and reporters hunting for hints of suppressed scandals.

?Newspapers are afraid of news these days. They are owned by powerful groups and you can?t find news anymore,? said D?Agostino, who famously slapped art critic and former government minister Vittorio Sgarbi in the face on national television in the 1990s.

?Dagospia exists because others don?t publish news,? D?Agostino said. ?Corriere della Sera journalists would love to produce 1,000 Dagospias ? but they can?t.?

The independence of Italy?s media has long been a subject of debate. The European Union earlier this year criticised Berlusconi, who has direct or indirect influence over 90 per cent of television, for excessive control of Italy?s media.

Commentators say Dagospia is likely to feed an appetite for tabloid journalism, but D?Agostino says regular advertisers steer clear of the site, obliging him to seek less savoury financial backers.

?Pornographic advertising is what keeps the site alive. I don?t get ads from Fiat, or (shoemaker) Geox and this is the alternative,? he said.

?But porn sets me free. I don?t care what they put on the site ? they pay well, and if I had Armani ads, I wouldn?t be able to write about him.?

D?Agostino set up Dagospia four years ago when his gossip column in the ?Espresso weekly was scrapped. He drew inspiration from the Drudge Report, the US online gossip sheet that helped break the Monica Lewinsky scandal. According to D?Agostino, Dagospia gets 500,000 hits a day.

He says he gets a torrent of unsourced items from anonymous contributors ? from journalists with rejected stories to people who are simply in the right place at the right time.

And his website has had several major breaks. He beat the conventional media with a report on the illness of Fiat chairman Umberto Agnelli, who died of cancer in May.

The site has become as famous for its content as for its iconoclastic tone in dealing with the near-royal Agnelli family and Berlusconi himself ? rare in a country where last year a satirical show was yanked off state television after only one show.