Page 147 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

136 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

been, so to say, universalized; other public spheres have been forgotten
or described using these as point of reference and also of judgement.
Indeed, when a public sphere of a different system is referred to, such
as, for example, Italy, it is judged in terms of backwardness, blaming
delays and malfunctions on the lack of journalistic professionalism, on
the overall degeneration of the parties as a whole, on the historical
distortions of the relations between the party system and the media in
which the latter have always been considered greatly dependent on the
former. Certainly all these are the ingredients of a partial and, in many
ways, contingent interpretation which can only partly explain the
peculiarities of this situation and the similarities and differences
compared to the situation of other western-style democracies. The aim
of this study is to describe the workings of the public sphere in Italy,
with special reference to political communication, and place them in a
theoretical frame of reference which defines the right parameters of
comparison with other national situations.
More exactly, this study examines the workings of a public sphere in
relation to a political system we shall call ‘coalitional complex’. Let’s
begin with several definitions, first of all of the public sphere. With this
term we refer to communicative exchanges and relations which focus on
subjects of public interest, in which the institutions of political power
and the institutions of mass media mainly, but not solely, interact with
2
each other.
In particular, in this chapter we shall examine political
communication which is a predominant ambit of communication in the
public sphere and defined on the basis of content (messages having
politics as their subject matter) or the persons involved (when those
issuing or receiving the messages are active mainly in the political
system). 3
Our analysis brings together the results of a rather vast body of
empirical investigation carried out in Italy (Grossi 1984; Agostini,
Fenati and Krol 1987) with theoretical methods of comparative
investigation (Blumler and Gurevitch 1975, 1981, 1986). It seems
necessary to begin with a description of several characteristics of the
Italian political system that are assumed as constants, that is as
parameters, which are relatively stable in time, for illustrating the
workings of the public sphere in relation to them and for comparing
different national situations. We shall also assume as constants the
structures of the relationships between the political system and the mass
media, according to the explanatory model suggested by Blumler and
Gurevitch (1975), in order to have the first comparative instrument.