Page 158 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE USE OF NEWS IN ‘COALITION’ GOVERNMENT 147

From this point of view, the Italian television viewer is certainly a
factionist; the prevalence of affiliation voting means more often than
not that the audience has already made its choice and in general all it
wants is a political communication confirming its beliefs. The members
of the audience wait for signs in which they can recognize themselves.
Both politicians and journalists alike know how to address such a public
which is already familiar with the linguistics of politics and only want
their favourite to win a clear victory over the opponent. The viewers or
readers who are familiar with the system of politics understand and even
accept the negotial use of political communication, even though it will
not include them among its privileged recipients. The public seems to
know and accept that this is what the game of politics is about and will
in any case feel strongly involved and close to a party even when the
party excludes such subjects from the list of privileged interlocutors.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

In the picture we have drawn, journalists perform an important role in
the negotial use of political communication; they are not intermediaries
between the ‘palace’ and the citizens, as stated in the traditional
literature on journalism which we referred to at the beginning, but
rather among the different members of the same ‘palace’. It does not
seem imprudent to state that the same role can be found in other
national situations having the same variables as the Italian political
system. I refer in particular to some European countries in which, even
though their historical evolution has been different, some of the
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characteristics described can be found. Here one defines space for a
public sphere in which journalistic information is called upon to perform
a function of intermediation essential for the functioning of the political
system itself and for the life of the social elites to which it offers channels
of publicly relevant communication. The journalists are not only
collectors and disseminators of information, they also guarantee a forum
for the public debate essential to the functioning of the social order
(Garnham 1986). As already suggested many years ago by Seymour-
Ure (1969), in the Italian political sphere the major function of political
communication is to connect horizontally various elite groups rather
than connect vertically the elite and citizens as stated in the classic
handbooks of journalism.
This appears to be a stable picture in which some signs of change are
related to the advent of the mass-media market system. The birth of
private television networks, for example, has begun to change some of