Page 120 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

Table 5.2 Party-Press Parallelism in Italian Newspaper Readership, 1996

Communist Democrats Popular Northern Forza National
Refounding of the Left Party League Italia Alliance
Corriere della sera 64 89 120 100 111 100
La Repubblica 124 156 122 54 34 62
La Stampa 71 105 81 215 98 65
Il Giornale 28 22 8 57 260 188
Il Giorno 0 75 61 246 164 93
La Nazione 84 70 193 0 88 153
Il Mattino 97 88 135 13 99 162
Resto del Carlino 126 111 135 56 83 85
Gazzetta 50 87 27 0 97 203
Mezzogiorno
L’Unit`a 165 245 19 19 19 35
L’Avvenire 47 47 613 60 27 60

Source: Sani (2001: 205).
Figures show the number of voters of a given party that read each paper, per hundred
readersofthatpaperinthepopulationasawhole.Thusfiguresover100indicatethatvoters
of that party are overrepresented in the paper’s readership; figures below 100 indicate that
they are underrepresented.
culture: it was started to be the Italian counterpart of the Anglo-Saxon
“objective,”neutralnewspaper,with“cold”headlinesandaverylowlevel
of news dramatization. But the attempt was not successful. Its circula-
tion remained small and soon its editor and founder was forced to resign
and the owners appointed a new editor, Vittorio Feltri, well known as a
combative journalist willing to take part in political struggle. Soon the
daily became the “unofficial voice” of the Northern League. Some Italian
papers, La Stampa or Il Corriere della Sera, especially, tilt more toward
information and less toward commentary than papers such as La Repub-
blica. But in general, commentary-oriented journalism has survived the
shift toward a stronger market orientation in the Italian press. Indeed
it could be argued that partisanship has been particularly intense in the
Italian press since media mogul Berlusconi entered politics.
One common manifestation of political parallelism is a significant
differentiation of media in terms of the political orientations of their
audience. Table 5.2 shows the political orientations of the readerships
of Italian papers from 1996. The figures make clear that the choices of
Italian newspaper readers are still strongly influenced by politics.

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