News Coverage of Elections in the Long Transition of Italian Democracy

To talk of election news coverage in terms of Italy means reasoning about the peculiar features of a democracy that has undergone both radical changes and extraordinary continuities. After the collapse of the consociational democracy and the dissolution of the traditional party system over the past thirteen years, the Italian political system has experienced the rise and decline of an antipolitical mood, two electoral reforms (soon to become three), and the political career of a media mogul (Berlusconi) who twice came to lead the country without giving up his media empire, but was also twice defeated by a very traditional politician who is not at all at ease on television. Things are no less complex in the field of journalism, where the consequences of an incomplete process of differentiation from politics met the challenges produced by a late and imperfect, but also very rapid and radical, modernization. The result is a hybrid system that shares many features with other mediated democracies but adapts them to a particular context, in which the connection between the political and media spheres has always been close, and where the relationship between “media logic” and “political logic” is still far from reaching equilibrium. The basic theme of this chapter is that in the meantime Italian election news coverage shows a high degree of mediatization and politicization. It follows the principles of a commercial broadcasting system but maintains a strong focus on political affairs, reserving greater space than in many other mediatized democracies. And while it is less subordinated to parties than in the past, it still has an adversarial orientation in a perspective that is frequently partisan.