Marco Mazzoni

Grasshoppers against Ants or Malfunctions of Capitalism? The Representation of the European Economic Crisis in the Main Italian Newspapers

Abstract How has the Eurozone crisis been covered in the Italian press? Who has been identified as bearing the main responsibility for the crisis? What is the image of the European Union (EU) that has emerged from this coverage? This article aims to answer such questions through a content analysis of four Italian newspapers (Il Sole 24 Ore, Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica and il Giornale) during 11 periods between 2010 and 2012. In our perspective, the topic we address is particularly important for two reasons: first, because the continuing Euro crisis is the most significant threat facing the EUs very existence since its formation, and second, because the media, through the coverage they provide, contribute to build both Europe and the support it needs to prosper.

Representations of Corruption in the British, French, and Italian Press: Audience Segmentation and the Lack of Unanimously Shared Indignation

As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 articles) from the period 2004 to 2013 were analyzed using dedicated software. We demonstrate that freedom of press is not the only dimension that affects the ability to and the way in which news media report on corruption. Because of its political partisanship, the Italian press tends to emphasize and dramatize corruption cases involving domestic public administrators and, in particular, politicians. The British coverage is affected mainly by market factors, and the press pays more attention to cases occurring abroad and in sport. The French coverage shares specific features with both the British and the Italian coverage: Newspapers mainly focus on corruption involving business companies and foreign actors, but they also cover cases involving domestic politicians. Media market segmentation, political parallelism, and media instrumentalization determine different representations preventing the establishment of unanimously shared indignation.

Measuring and Explaining the Diversity of Voices and Viewpoints in the News

News media can be considered to fulfil their democratic role as a “marketplace of ideas” only if they present a diverse content that gives space to a wider range of ideas and viewpoints. But how can content diversity be assessed? And what determines actor and viewpoint diversity in the first place? By employing measurements of actor and viewpoint diversity at the article and newspaper level, this study provides a complete overview on the content diversity of immigration news, and it investigates factors that have an impact on content diversity of immigration newspaper articles in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom (2013–2014). The results of a multilevel analysis indicate that both the articles’ size and the elite character of a newspaper play a key role in enhancing news’ multiperspectivalness. Also, the findings show that these two measurements of content diversity are different yet related to each other.

Political intimization as a key to bypassing traditional leadership selection procedures: The case of Matteo Renzi

Italy’s Partito Democratico has for a long time been characterized by rigid mechanisms of leadership selection. Prior to Renzi’s ascent to leadership, no leader had managed to rise to power without being backed up by the party’s key figures. By undertaking a content analysis of Italy’s most important entertainment magazine, Chi, and by comparing Matteo Renzi’s coverage with the coverage received by another three Partito Democratico leading figures, Pier Luigi Bersani, Massimo D’Alema and Enrico Letta, this article argues that when demand for political innovation is particularly high, political intimization can represent an alternative and fruitful way to party leadership.

How Italian politics goes popular: Evidence from an empirical analysis of gossip magazines and TV shows

It is widely acknowledged that present-day politicians are becoming celebrities. This causes significant effects on the way printed and audiovisual media outlets have started covering them. In fact, political leaders’ private lives are increasingly scanned by gossip magazines and entertainment TV programmes, whose coverage contributes to feed people’s interest over political leaders’ personal sphere. However, as is shown in this case study, in Italy this phenomenon seems to develop in a peculiar way. First, in spite of the fact that both media share the same goal, which is to entertain their public, gossip magazines and TV shows seem to follow very different coverage strategies. Second, and more importantly, only those politicians who belong to the centre-right political area receive a considerable coverage. In the authors’ view, this is due to a greater openness to the use of unconventional political communication forms, as well as a more marked inclination to being affected by political scandals.

Pop-politics in times of crisis: The Italian tabloid press during Mario Monti’s government

Modern politicians need to diversify their communication strategies to reach a wide range of citizens/electors. Communication of political programmes must be associated with the effective communication of the private sphere. However, does this rule apply to a scenario in which the political stage is not ruled by politicians? By presenting the results of a content analysis of four Italian tabloids and by relying on an interview with the communication officer of Italian former premier, this study shows how political popularization develops in the era of the technocrat. The authors claim that the search for ‘mediated intimacy’ with the citizens/electors does not exclusively represent a concern for professional politicians. The need to personify political action is not only dependent on the necessity to maximize the electoral turnout, but it also depends on the acknowledgement of the fact that any public officer cannot avoid opening the doors of his or her own private sphere.

The politicization of entertainment media: A study of the Italian tabloid Chi during the 2013 electoral campaign:

The concept of political parallelism identifies the different forms in which the media and politics can interact. However, media partisanship has always been almost exclusively limited to news media. This study shows that the Italian media system is at the center of a significant change, in regard to the way in which mass media political parallelism works and develops. Due to structural reasons, Italy’s political parallelism crosses the threshold of the news media and seems to fully apply to popular media as well. The politicization of popular media has been investigated through a content analysis of the Berlusconi-owned Chi (the most read magazine in Italy with 3.5 million readers on average). By proposing four models of coverage, the authors will show that the coverage strategies put in place by Chi convey the extent to which the covered subjects are politically and personally close to the undisputed leader, Berlusconi.

An incomplete transition? How Italian politicians manage the celebritisation of politics

The celebritisation of politics is a process that depends on both the mass media’s need to find new stories to cover and new stars to build, and the politicians’ need for new forms of visibility to reach their constituency. This article aims to provide an overview of the forms through which the celebratisation of politics has occurred and developed in Italy. By referring to a variety of qualitative data, some of the specificities which characterise the Italian transition towards celebritised politics will be highlighted and analysed. In fact, whereas the members of one of the two main party coalitions – the centre-right coalition – appear to have fully assimilated the new rules of political advertising and promotion, their opponents still experience clear difficulties in managing the new tools of political communication. We argue that these difficulties are due to a still-existent ideological bias that prevents centre-left politicians from adapting their political action to the celebrity codes that are enforced in the political battlefield. The differing approaches of these parties testify to an ongoing transition within Italian politics that appears far from over, despite Berlusconi’s recent withdrawal from the political scene.

How the EU member states’ press represented the Euro Crisis:

The article analyzes how the press in 10 European countries portrayed the Euro crisis. It aims at identifying the main interpretations given to the crisis and at evaluating to what extent such interpretations were influenced by variables such as the national belonging, the newspapers’ typology, and ideological orientation. By applying the technique of the multiple correspondence analysis, we highlighted that the interpretations of the Euro crisis were organized along four major dimensions: (1) accuracy, (2) magnitude and accountability mechanism, (3) attitude and expectations, and (4) characterization. Results suggest that facing common problems did not encourage the press of different states to cover the Euro crisis in a similar way. Rather, the most interesting finding appears to be the prevalent intra-country homogeneity that reveals similarities among different newspapers’ types.

Constraints and limitations of investigative journalism in Hungary, Italy, Latvia and Romania:

The article provides evidences about mechanisms and practices that undermine the effectiveness of investigative journalism through the analysis of selected case studies of corruptive phenomena in Italy, Hungary, Romania and Latvia. In particular, the article shows that the idea of watchdog journalism does not work actually in the observed countries. Indeed, investigative journalism requires certain socio-economic conditions, such as a low degree of influence of the political and economic spheres and a high level of journalistic professionalism, which are not (always) present in the aforementioned countries. More specifically, the article focuses on three aspects that may distort investigative journalists’ work: a certain proximity (sometimes overlapping) of publishers (often rich oligarchs or prominent businessmen) and politicians, the ‘blackmail’ exercised through advertising investments and the interferences of secret services, which may dissuade newsrooms from performing their role as the watchdog.