Paolo Mancini

Between Trust and Suspicion: How Political Journalists Solve the Dilemma

This article deals with the news gathering activity of Italian political journalists. Their interaction with information sources develops within a framework of constant ambivalence between trust and suspicion. Political journalists resolve this ambivalence through a problem-solving activity which implies a phase of negotiation with politicians and then a discussion with colleagues to verify their interpretation of the situation. From this derives a model of journalism which is strongly interpretative and closer to commentary than to news reporting. After a discussion of the theoretical and methodological basis, the article highlights the Italian environment — the places, routines and roles — within which the political journalism is carried out.

Media Fragmentation, Party System, and Democracy:

This paper discusses the possible consequences of mass media fragmentation over the structure and the functioning of democracy. Media fragmentation and audience segmentation are not new but they greatly increased in the very last years because of the long ongoing tendency towards commercialization and mostly because of the development of new media and the internet in particular. This has determined what is usually defined “the crisis of traditional journalism” that has become the very frequent topic of most of the seminar on journalism today. The last part of the paper looks at the possible consequences of these changes over the structure of democracy beyond the well rooted techno-optimism: increasing social and political polarization, new forms of political socialization, more complex process of social and political negotiation, new forms of public scrutiny.

How to Combine Media Commercialization and Party Affiliation: The Italian Experience

As is well known, the 1980s represent an important phase of transformation of the mass media system throughout Europe. What Jay Blumler (1992) defined as “the commercial deluge” became a reality in those years: The entire system expanded and entered a market and competitive regime in which private ownership of the mass media predominated over public ownership. The previous monopoly regime of the public television service was overturned; new television stations were created; even the press developed. The bond that previously existed between the system of mass communication and the system of political parties was shattered or, at least, weakened by the logic of competition. Commercialization of the mass media system took shape simultaneously with a more general process of secularization that has radically changed Italian society as well as other European societies. Let’s have a brief look at the elements that mainly characterized the relationship between the political system and the system of mass communications in Italy before the changes of the 1980s. While written journalism in Italy has always been underdeveloped, ranking among the lowest in Europe in daily circulation of newspapers,1 television has always had a large audience (the average one for the main Italian television news programs is more than 6 million viewers per day). The limited market for print journalism has always meant very poor earnings if not debit balance sheets. As a result, ownership of the press passed into the hands of industrial groups that draw their income from business activities outside of publishing. Consequently, until a few years ago journalism was considered a losing product. Nevertheless, for those who could afford to own them by virtue of success in other businesses, newspapers and periodicals did provide their owners with instruments that could shape favorable public opinion. Although today the situation

Instrumentalization of the media vs. political parallelism

I examine the possible differences between the concept of media instrumentalization and political parallelism. In the first part of this paper, I aim to reconstruct the history of the concept of political parallelism that derives from Seymour-Ures concept of party parallelism. I will then discuss why and how party parallelism has transformed into political parallelism by following the transformation of mass political parties. Different dimensions of political parallelism are illustrated, including how it is linked to specific structures of the public sphere and to the idea of external pluralism. A similar discussion focuses on media instrumentalization. In the last part, I attempt to highlight different social and political conditions that motivate instrumentalization and political parallelism.

Leader, president, person: Lexical ambiguities and interpretive implications

This article discusses the possible ambiguities that exist between three different words: personalization, presidentialization and leader. In recent times, and mostly in Europe, the first two words have been used very frequently by media scholars and political scientists to point out changes taking place both in the decision-making process and in the public arena. At the same time, the older word, leader, is still alive and very much used. Do these words, and the processes they involve, have the same meaning? Do they refer to different changes? Are they used without the sufficient cognitive awareness? The article proposes three dimensions that may be useful to understand similarities and differences in the use of these three words.

Mass-Media Research in Italy: Culture and Politics:

This article examines the impact of cultural, ideological and scientific factors on Italian mass communication research from its origins in the 1960s to the present. Relatively constant influences have included (a) a strong tendency among scholars to social involvement, facilitating normative approaches, (b) a debate over general theoretical issues, and (c) long-standing funding support from RAI (the Italian broadcasting company), concerned to evaluate its public service objectives. Shifts over time from critical theory to more pragmatic perspectives and from reliance on content analysis techniques to a distinctively Italian semiotic approach to media texts are traced. More recent influences have included the unregulated explosion of private commercial television and a keen interest in studying audience reception.

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.

Between Normative Research and Theory of Forms and Content: Italian Studies on Mass Communication

This article discusses the combination of influences on the focus and direction of Italian media research after its beginnings over thirty years ago, through the 1970s and up to and including current research efforts. During the 1950s and 1960s, Catholic culture was a strong influence and this combined with normative goals in the research commissioned by RAI. An important political and ideological debate on the future of the Italian broadcasting system influenced the direction and subjects of research in the 1970s. Present day research seems more influenced by the start of competition between public service broadcasting and commercial networks in Italy.

The Italian public sphere: a case of dramatized polarization

This contribution is organized along two main interpretive lines. First: the Italian public sphere is very polarized because of well-established historical attitudes, a crowded media market and new technologies that push towards segmentation of the audience. The arrival of Berlusconi has only reinforced the already existing polarization that goes well beyond the borders of partisanship involving the content of news, the structure and professionalism of news outlets and also the recipients that divide themselves along the lines of political attitudes. The second characteristic feature of the Italian public sphere involves the tendency towards dramatization, which is also produced by the sudden commercialization of the entire mass media system that started in 1980. This articles thesis is supported by examples of dramatization and extreme political discourse. The consequences that derive from this situation are discussed in the conclusion.