Page 146 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 6
The public sphere and the use of news in
a ‘coalition’ system of government

Paolo Mancini

SOME DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXTUAL
DATA
In recent years some important changes have taken place in the Italian
public sphere and, in particular, in political communication. I refer
especially to the personalization and dramatization of politics and news,
the use of advertising techniques in political communication, the
progressive erosion of the ‘protected’ circuits of communication and the
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functions of socialization which, up to now, have been the functions of
the political party. These changes are mainly linked to the birth of
commercial television and yet they have occurred in an overall picture
which has remained essentially unchanged, where many aspects have
even been considered reinforced. At this point I therefore felt it
appropriate to deal with the problem from a different angle, one that
could explain not so much the changes but rather the persistencies. And
this essay is aimed at being the first step in that direction.
The sacred texts of journalism, I refer especially to the works by
Lippman (1965) and the theories of Siebert, Peterson and Schramm
(1963), have taken as models several specific public spheres (above all,
the Anglo-Saxon countries) and mainly have defined the functions of
journalistic information in relation and in opposition to the political
systems in force in those countries. It is possible to define these
political systems as ‘majoritarian’, in which a clear boundary line exists
between the majority and the opposition and there is more than just the
theoretical possibility that different political forces will alternate in the
government. They are systems which may be called, for the sake of
brevity, ‘simple’, based on bipartisanism with the presence, at the
most, of an alliance between two political forces. Such models, and the
resulting systems of relationship with journalistic information, have