Page 156 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE USE OF NEWS IN ‘COALITION’ GOVERNMENT 145

political issues accounted for 37.5 per cent of the subjects dealt with in
broadcasts organized by public and private television with the
participation of politicians and journalists, while policy issues
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accounted for 21.1 per cent (Cheli, Mancini, Mazzoleni and Tinacci
Mannelli 1989).
As we have said, the predominance of political issues characterizes
all Italian political communication even though it is even more evident
during elections when the main questions almost always concern the
make-up of the future government coalition, and political messages
focused on concrete questions and their proposed solutions seem
inappropriate. Solutions will rather be the subject of mediation among
the participants of the future coalition and it is therefore unnecessary to
become involved in projects and proposals which would certainly be
modified during long and fatiguing negotiation. This is a characteristic
shared by all proportional electoral systems in which the vote determines
the strength of party representation and not the nature of the electoral
programmes. It is significant that insistence on political issues is not
limited to those active in the political system; journalists, too, propose
these issues as the main topics for discussion at press meetings,
interviews, etc. Politicians and journalists alike act according to
established practices within a common symbolical universe which is
focused essentially on the themes that should be negotiated among the
many and different individuals and groups who will then form the
coalition.
Those who receive this political message are the same ones active in
the political system or, as we say in Italy, those who move within the
‘palazzo’ (‘palace’, establishment). When the reporter writes his piece,
he knows it will be addressed to another member of the establishment:
the statement or press release his article is based on is produced by the
original political party source so that it might arrive, be received and
interpreted by someone who is almost always another player in the same
coalition political system. Almost thirty years ago Enzo Forcella, an
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expert on mass media and today an editorialist for La Repubblica, wrote
an essay titled ‘Fifteen-hundred readers’, some lines of which are
quoted here:

a political journalist in our country can count on about fifteen-
hundred readers: the ministers and undersecretaries (all), the
members of Parliament (some), the party leaders, union leaders,
high prelates and a few industrialists who want to show they are
informed. The rest don’t count, even if the paper sells three