Page 155 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

144 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

refer to such papers as La Repubblica, Il Giornale, Il Corriere della
Sera, La Stampa. In particular the first two, La Repubblica and Il
Giornale, are ‘opinion’ dailies that in just a few years have become a
new and significant factor in Italian political journalism. For them too,
however, what has been stated above applies, as they are only partially
equipped with the power to construct an independent agenda of public
discussion, and, more often than not, are limited to reporting and
commenting on proposals received almost completely from the political
system. Nevertheless, these papers express judgements on political
negotiations and are endowed with sufficient credibility and public
legitimation not just to influence people’s opinions, but essentially to
define the agenda of the discussion among the political, cultural and
business elite. In this sense the debate that takes place within the public
sphere assures its actors and their proposals the public relevance that
would otherwise be lacking with contacts outside the scrutiny of the
journalistic system and that otherwise would not be congenial to the
historical evolution of the relations of ‘parallelism’ that exist between
the press and politics. In Italy the mechanism of public ‘sanctions’ and
‘judgement’ is therefore assured regarding the proposals put forward
and the statements released, and this only further institutionalizes the
process we have described.

SOME EMPIRICAL INDICATORS
The picture given up to now has certain consequences involving
structure, content and form that also represent the empirical data
produced by numerous studies which have inspired our discussion
(Grossi, Mancini and Mazzoleni 1985, Marletti 1985, Cheli, Mancini,
Mazzoleni and Tinacci Mannelli 1989).
In Italian political and above all electoral communication, political
issues traditionally dominate over policy issues. By the first we mean
all the more specifically political questions such as alliances, coalitions,
government formulas, etc., while policy issues include the concrete
problems on which it is necessary to make political decisions: inflation,
pollution, drugs, etc. The 1983 and 1987 election campaign data fully
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confirmed this tendency: in 1983 newspaper coverage of the election
campaign was strongly focused on political issues; on the other hand,
party propaganda focused also on subjects related to policy issues as a
result in particular of the pressure and provocation from private
television networks, even if political issues were prevalent (Grossi,
Mancini and Mazzoleni 1985). In the election campaign of 1987 the