The role of the press in times of pandemics: old features in the face of a new risk. The Italian case
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The role of the press in times of pandemics:
old features in the face of a new risk. The Italian case
Susanna Pagiotti*, Marco Mazzoni*, Roberto Mincigrucci*, Anna Stanziano*, Sofia Verza*
* University of Perugia
Draft, please do not quote
Introduction
The emergency related to the Covid-19 pandemic represented – and continues to represent – a great
challenge for contemporary societies that are facing an almost-unknown threat and an
unprecedented crisis. The nature of this pandemic is not only challenging for the health systems or
for governments, that are struggling with the research of health, economic, social and political
response measures. It is also a great challenge for the information systems (Thomas 2020) that find
themselves in the middle of a hurricane: on one hand information (first of all coming from the
scientific world) are partial and conflicting and, on the other hand, people are more than ever
seeking reliable information (Di Salvo, Nucci 20201). As Ed Wasserman affirmed during the
Berkeley Conversations2 of May 6, 2020 on the role of the media during the Covid-19 pandemic,
“[…] it’s incredible how novel this challenge is. I have really never seen a story that has as many
perplexing and nettlesome dimensions as this one does. The velocity of the story is extraordinary.
The complexity of the story and the disparate ways it's impacting on society is kind of without
precedent […] It comes a time when the media have really never been quite as ill-prepared to
handle”. The words of professor Wasserman give the idea of the difficulty that journalism systems
have faced, because of the complete unpreparedness of journalists to an event of this magnitude. In
these types of circumstances and in a contemporary media context - generally characterized by
infodemic (abundance of information) - what should be avoided is a mere “coverage of chaos”, as
Daniel Nyakonah, General Secretary of Press Union of Liberia, defined the national coverage of the
Ebola epidemic (Thomas 2020). On this line, great attention was focused by the academic world
and not only3 on understanding the role of the media in a crisis of this type, on their ability and
potential to manage the Covid-19 crisis, playing a central role in its governance. In this sense, the
media, as social actors (Luckmann 1966), participate in emergency management because of their
capability to support, or on the contrary to criticize, social control policies and other decisions taken
on the issue at stake, through their ability to respond effectively to the unpredictability of disasters,
since they are able not only to mirror the reality but also to create it (Dunwoody 1992). As Mellado
(2014) affirms, journalism is decisive in the exercise of power in modern societies, and the way
1
Article available at https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/italy-coronavirus-and-the-media (retrieved on July 22nd 2020)
2
Berkeley Conversations is a live online series featuring faculty experts from across the Berkeley campus who are
sharing what they know, and what they are learning, about the pandemic. The conversation cited in the text is available
at the link https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/05/06/covid-19-and-the-media-the-role-of-journalism-in-a-global- pandemic/
3
Among them, the UNESCO promoted the project “Journalism in a pandemic: covering covid-19 now and in the future
(MOOC)” that aims to cover the past history of pandemics and disasters in the 20th century and how governments
responded to these outbreaks, also examining the unfolding of the 2020 pandemic and the fundamental importance of
fostering freedom of expression, as well as detecting and combating disinformation and misinformation about the
pandemic.journalists deliver news information has a profound impact on the shaping of the public debate, also
influencing the public perception of risks (Vasterman, Ruigrok 2013). However, the nature of the
Covid-19 risk and the old vices of journalism, often too oriented in favor of interests other than the
public one, could have influenced the coverage of the pandemic and, therefore, the role played by
journalists in the risk governance, communicating and conditioning the acceptability of the related
social control policies.
The case that will be analyzed in these pages is the Italian one. In the moment of our
writing, the crisis due to the pandemic is not yet over and Italy is still managing the so-called
“phase 2” of the measures responding to the Covid-19 epidemic. The Italian case turns out to be an
interesting case for several reasons: on the one hand, in relation to the global spread of the
pandemic, Italy is “the patient-nation 1 of the western world” (Sfardini 2020) and the first country
in the world after China to undertake quarantine measures after the dizzying increase of positive
cases, attracting global attention in the first weeks of self-isolation in the moment of greatest
uncertainty; on the other, as regards the peculiarities of the Italian information system, Italy
presents “historical vices” that have always characterized the way of working of the Italian
journalism, namely a strong political parallelism and a low level of journalistic professionalization
(Hallin, Mancini 2004). These elements combined can provide a useful framework to understand in
depth the role of journalism in times of crises of this type, in contexts where the traditional
journalistic features may privilege some interests (for example, those of the ruling authorities) at the
expense of others (e.g. the citizens’ health). Therefore, by analyzing the Italian newspaper coverage
of the first intense weeks of the virus outbreak, this paper aims to outline the role played by
journalists in the governance of the Covid-19 emergency and their contribution in handling the
social control policies put in place.
1. Theoretical framework
1.1 Pandemic risk and its mediated narrative
The ongoing pandemic represents a hybrid risk, whose nature could be located between Beck’s
“natural hazards” and “manufactured risks” (emerging as ‘side effects’ of economic, technological,
and scientific development) (2009). Furthermore, one of the peculiarities of the risk related to the
Covid-19 virus is linked to the fact that we are speaking about a “continuous risk”, potentially
lasting in the long-term indefinitely: that makes it harder to accept and metabolize. As Sellnow et
al. (2018) stated, health crises like a pandemic one, unlike others, are by their nature narratives
particularly difficult to manage because they do not end in the narration of an event but are
indefinite over time in search of a solution (of a vaccine) and affect the population indiscriminately.
In the new social systems - based on the idea of potential measurability and control of risks through
technological advancements - new, unknown and widely uncontrollable risks are undermining the
status quo: they are perceived as if a “wizard is not able anymore to control the powers of the
underworld he himself invoked” (Luhmann 1996). The Covid-19 related risk undoubtedly falls into
the category of the “new risks”, described by Beck (2009): their main characteristic is their global
interconnectedness, due to a new social complexity and a global economy. The particular elements
that have characterized - and still characterize - the Covid-19 pandemic led Nygren and Olofsson to
define it as “a late modern complex mega risk, where our dependence on experts is evident” (2020,
p. 3).Despite the reliance on expert sources to report on the pandemic, also in the case of the
Covid-19, the social complexity requires however to be simplified in the moment in which it is
communicated (Iyengar, 1990): simplifying deals with a process of selection and exclusion of
information, that might lead to a polarized or even “schizophrenic” coverage of news on the
pandemic, when journalism is not careful in simplifying issues in a linear way and when the
different actors involved (in primis, for our analysis, the different news outlets) do not choose to
report the same aspects of the risk, but prefer to highlight certain attributes of the issue under study
rather than others (McCombs 2004). These choices of identification and evaluation of the risks are
linked to “relationships of definition”, that are power relationships, of juridical, epistemological and
cultural matrix (Beck 1999). These power relationships could unfold themselves also in the case of
the Covid-19 issue, even if it is a scientific issue, characterized by a high dependence on expert
sources, as said above, and thus theoretically unlikely to be a contested issue.
The contestability of the Covid-19 risk and of the subsequent social control policies is
strongly connected to three main considerations. The first one holds an epistemological nature: hard
sciences themselves are not perfect and not all scientists agree on everything (Sfardini 2020;
Caniglia 2020). Secondly, even if science modeled our society in the last two centuries, scientists'
judgments are not considered true “for granted'': the mass media, writers, movements, politicians,
obtained the right to speak and express their opinions on scientific matters as well (Dominici 2010);
“far from erasing the troubles and difficulties of everyday life, the growth of knowledge, expertise
and channels of communicating information and help has expanded the scope of problematization”
(Eide, Knight, 1999, p. 526). Third, power relationships are more or less explicitly expressed in the
media contents: an issue is an aggregation of discourses (among them, the news), produced and
employed by multiple actors in the public space, to negotiate - even in a conflictual way - around a
socio-political question: in this sense, the discourse around an issue is very important for the
process of social construction of the public choices (Luhmann 1978). Therefore, it is important for
this study to investigate (i) how does the media material “perform” such risk logics to support or
pose critique towards the governing powers and (ii) who do the news outlets under analysis
represent and whose interests are being protected (citizens, decision makers, vulnerable groups,
scientists, etc.). These focuses are important to study the ways in which the “ongoing reality” of
“large-scale dangers, risks and produced insecurities triggers dynamics of cultural and political
change [...] endangering the predominance of science and redefining the borders and the battlefields
of contemporary politics” (Beck, 1992).
In line with what has been said, it has to be remembered that risks as the Covid-19 one are
“open to social processes of definition” (Beck 1992). It is therefore consequential that a central
feature of the new social complexity is the increasing central role of mediated communication: the
cognitive agenda of different social actors is increasingly structured by mediated communication
processes (Thompson 1995; Bentivegna 1994). Altheide even considers social order as a
“communicated order”: accordingly, “power is the ability to define a situation, and the interaction
and communication which helps accomplish and enact definitions are crucial to social order, social
reality, and social change” (2013); similarly, Castells noted that “throughout history communication
and information have been fundamental sources of power and counter-power, of domination and
social change. This is because the fundamental battle being fought in society is the battle over the
minds of the people” (2006). Therefore, the information system has a key role in risk and crisis
management, because in order to manage a risk, the “artificially produced insecurities”, i.e. those
produced through the mediated representations, are increasingly important. The media contribute toprocessing collective anxiety and to the metabolization of risk (Vasterman, Ruigrok 2013): this
influences the risks’ acceptability, that together with the social amplification of the risk are
important variables for policy making (Pidgeon, Kasperson, Slovic 2003). As a matter of fact, “if
we are irrational in our judgments about risk, the policies we enact will reflect a similar bias”
(Teuber 1993).
That is why we can speak about “ideal paradigms” of journalism in times of crises: there is a
developing body of literature on the ways in which risk information can be effectively
communicated: it focuses on the nature of risk information and on the ways in which the
communication of this information can be improved (Thomas, 2020).
1.2 The service role of journalism for risk communication
The imposition of lockdowns, restrictions to free movement and the obligation of wearing masks
and gloves in public spaces were directed toward the individual citizens, and - in the context of
mediating such social control policies through news articles - towards the individual readers. These
are all potential contents for what is defined by literature as the service role of journalism (Eide,
Knight 1999; Mellado 2014, 2015; Alvear, Mellado, 2018): it deals with the diffusion of indications
and explanations related to everyday behaviors, in the case under study motivated by the need of
safeguarding one’s own and the others’ health, therefore identifying a common good and public
interest to be pursued.
After Eide and Knight’s first elaboration of the concept, a rich literature was born around
the service role of journalism. In this sense Mellado (2015) extended the concept, distinguishing
between role conception and role performance where the first is ideal (what is important to do as a
journalist), while the latter is more about behaviors, concrete actions, leading to perform a function
in society (Biddle 1979; Burke, Reitzes 1981), so that role conceptions and performances can
sometimes not fully correspond. Moreover, this role is not necessarily depoliticized, assuming that,
together with the individualization of problems service journalists can also stress the political side
of an issue (Eide, Knight 1999). To operationalize this concept, Alvear and Mellado (2018) propose
five different indicators: the impact of news contents on daily life, the presence of advice for
complaints, advice for individual risks, consumption information and consumption advice. These
criteria are generally applied in a normal daily context, other than a situation of emergency;
however, a context of urgency as the pandemic we have been living increases the need for this kind
of information through the performance of what we will call “service journalism for risk
communication”.
Mellado (2015) outlined that service journalism combines the rights and self-interest of the
audience: as an answer to the growing complexity of modernity, it provides knowledge, information
and advice that audiences can apply in their day-to-day lives (Underwood 2001). Moreover, the
paradigm on the service role of journalism reconducts it to a primarily informational role, aimed at
instructing the reader about “behaviors that might be risky in terms of their future implications, and
providing guidance about what steps to take to reduce and control risk” (Eide, Knight 1999). This
way, the concept of “risk” deals for a great part with the future: the future risks are thematized in
the present, in what Beck calls the “semantic of risk”. Especially for “manufactured risks” or
anyway risks that are partially controllable by humans (e.g. the spreading of a pandemic, conversely
than an earthquake), the risk represents “the perception and the model of thinking of the dynamic
mobilizing a society, that has to deal with the openness, insecurities and blocks of a self-producedfuture” (Beck 1999). The idea of self-production of the future is in line with Eide and Knight’s
definition of what a risk is, as opposed to a grievance, and the role of individuals in managing it:
according to the two scholars, “the individual who is at risk is to some extent seen as the author of
his or her own endangerment” (1999, p. 546). In the case of grievance problems (e.g. noisy
neighbors), the ultimate aim of action is changing the others’ behavior; in the case of risk-based
problems, instead, changing one’s own behavior is both the means and goal of action (Eide, Knight,
1999): this is the case for the social control policies enacted in Italy during the Covid-19
emergency, as well as in most of the countries worldwide, like self-isolation, wearing masks and
gloves.
Moreover, the “service journalism for risk communication” might deal with emotions like
anxiety and fear, to increase the perception of social vulnerability (Eide, Knight, 1999; Turner et al.
2003) and induce the reader to modify his or her behaviors not to become a potential victim, to
avoid the sufferings represented by the media. One of the features increasing this vulnerability
feeling is the “mathematization” of the catastrophe: the development of the pandemic was greatly
described in quantitative and numerical terms, through “alarmist frames” (Vasterman, Ruigrok
2013). Therefore, it will be important in the empirical part of this analysis to pay attention to the
extent of coverage dedicated to the continuous repetition of data on infections, hospitalizations,
beds in intensive care, heals and deaths in the Covid-19 narrative. According to this framework, the
media would have been performing what Altheide calls “politics of fear” (2006), intended as a
conjunction of the symbolic politics of the commercial media and those of leaders and political
institutions, based on alimenting insecurity feelings. These observations are also in line with the
scholarship on dramatization in the Italian public sphere: accordingly, market competition has
mixed the already existing media partisanship with dramatization, exaggerating the tones and
language employed in the news to reach and keep a politically segmented audience (Mancini 2013).
Political segmentation, therefore, persists also in the case of “extraordinary events”: they open
“windows of discursive opportunity” for some actors and influence the interpretation of the events
themselves (Birkland 1997).
Little has been written on the topic of journalism reporting on pandemics. Nevertheless,
some studies on the topic have shown that situations of harsh health crises do not guarantee a type
of journalism at the service of citizens: in this sense, for example, Cornia et al. (2015) have
analyzed the coverage of the 2009 swine flu pandemic by comparing three different countries in
terms of characteristics of their media systems (Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom). The study
showed that the way the issue was covered differed between the three countries, accentuating some
characteristics at the expense of others: only Sweden presented a journalistic role oriented to serve
the audience; in the case of Italy, instead, the tight relationship between journalism and politics
affected the way the swine flu was covered, and the social control policies put in place by the
government represented an occasion to attack the ruling authorities. Similarly, in the English case,
the coverage was tied to politics but mainly due to the important watchdog role national media
usually play in the UK, in this specific case monitoring the correctness of the social control policies
adopted.
1.3 The Italian context
Following what has just been said, it is appropriate to dedicate a few lines here to describe the
specific nature of the Italian political and media context, before moving to the empirical part of thisstudy: historically, power relationships in Italy are characterized by a range of sharply polarized and
conflictual political leads, together with a lack of consensus on the basic structure of the social
order (Sartori 1976). According to Hallin and Mancini (2004), such political context has regular
patterns of association with important characteristics of the media system, where newspapers are
“the principal participants in struggles among diverse ideological camps”. Accordingly,
partisanship and polarization are two of the main characteristics of one of the three ideal-types of
media systems outlined by Hallin and Mancini, namely the Polarized Pluralist systems: the two
scholars theorized that Italy and other Mediterranean countries fall in this category, characterized
by weak commercial media, the integration of media into party politics, a strong role for the state
and a low level of journalistic professionalism. These features, in conjunction with the novelty and
uncertain nature of the Covid-19 risk, could have rendered the press coverage of the pandemic
particularly fragmentary, losing the focus on the identification of a common good and public
interest to be pursued through individual behaviors, typical of service journalism. Thus, the
contestable nature of the risk could have become a battlefield for news outlets with different
political leanings (Cornia et al. 2015), up to the fact the latters are siding or not with the
government and its Covid-related policies.
Therefore, our research questions are:
1- Does the journalistic service role emerge from the analysis of the Italian press in the first
phase of the Covid-19 emergency or, coherently with its typical features, the press reported
on the pandemic and the related social control policies polarizing the public debate?
2- Which interests and power relationships emerge from the press coverage of the pandemic
and the related social control policies? Was the mainstream press under analysis sustaining
the ruling authorities and the control measures they adopted or critically scrutinized them
according to the political leaning of the single news outlets?
Considering the framework presented above, we assume that the polarized nature of the Italian
media system combined with the new and hybrid nature of the Covid-19 risk might have therefore
led to the reproduction of old journalistic features, where “almost all the Italian news media are
biased in their content” and “try to take active part in the decision-making process by setting the
symbolic context within which this process takes place” (Mancini 2013). Clearly, these features
clash with the paradigm of service journalism, that would suggest a more objective coverage,
functional to the readers’ needs in their every-day choices and behaviors: usually, however, in the
Italian context, “objectivity is reached through the ‘plurality of partialities’, which is a very
different public sphere from the traditional liberal public sphere” (Mancini 2013). In this regard, we
hypothesize the polarization of the public debate on the Covid-19 risk took place in terms of
political closeness to the ruling coalition government: therefore, a critical scrutiny of the control
policies adopted was more intense in “opposition” newspapers and reproduced power relationships
based on a press- party parallelism.
We believe this study could be of use for future investigations on the Covid-19 news
coverage in contexts characterized by high political polarization and high press-party parallelism,
therefore actually in most of the countries that were more hardly hitten by the pandemic until the
moment of this writing. In fact, numerous studies found the Hallin and Mancini’s variables
characterizing the Italian media system, from political polarization to press-party parallelism, from
the strong interventionism of the state in news production to low level of journalistic
professionalism, to be workable variables in other countries as well, for example in the Post-
Communist countries of Central Eastern Europe (Zielonka 2015), in the Middle-East and LatinAmerica (Hallin, Mancini 2012). It is true that different models of democracy have different
normative implications for the media and journalism; hence how we evaluate the media depends on
what model of democracy we ascribe to (Strömbäck 2005): the countries often defined as “new”,
“transitional” or “third-wave” democracies (Huntington 1991), however, even if they differ for a
great number of context-related variables, do reproduce some of the political and media-systems’
characteristics outlined above, from a macro-perspective (Voltmer 2008). That is why we believe
that more country-case investigations on the role of the press in times of the Covid-19 pandemic
would be enriching for the academic community, in order to closer scrutinize the different
implications of a global risk for local contexts.
2. Methodology
In order to answer to the research questions outlined in the previous paragraph, we made a
computerized content analysis of six Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica and Il
Giornale print edition; Il Messaggero and Il Fatto Quotidiano digital edition; the online-only
Huffington Post Italy). The choice of the corpus of analysis was made taking into account the
consumption of the various media outlets, their centrality in the information landscape, but also in
order to have a range of outlets with different degrees of political closeness to the ruling
government. The current Italian government is composed by a coalition between the Democratic
Party (PD) and the Five Stars Movement (M5S), and is guided by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
Among the news outlets selected for our analysis Il Corriere della Sera is one of Italy’s oldest
newspaper and it has the largest circulation in Italy. La Repubblica is the second most popular
newspaper in Italy, born as a radical leftist newspaper, it has since then moderated to a milder
center-left political stance. Il Giornale is a nationally distributed newspaper owned by the
Berlusconi family with a liberal and conservative orientation, a newspaper close to the center-right
political area. Il Messaggero is a historic national newspaper owned by Caltagirone Editore which
with its eleven local editions, in support of the national edition, pays close attention to a more local
dimension. Il Fatto Quotidiano is a rather young national newspaper, established in 2009, and close
to the Five Stars Movement. The web version of this newspaper is registered as an independent
newspaper. The Italian edition of the Huffington Post debuted on 25 September 2012 and is among
the online-only news websites most visited by the Italian users. Like La Repubblica, the Huffington
Post is part of the GEDI publishing group.
In total, 23.720 articles were collected, using the keywords “covid” and “coronavirus”, over 7
weeks (February 21-April 5, 2020)4. The entire corpus was analyzed with the QDA Miner software,
a tool for the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of texts, and its quantitative component
WordStat, a text mining tool capable of identifying the recurring themes within the text. The data
were organized on a daily basis and per newspaper, having as a unit of analysis all the articles
published by a single newspaper on a given day. The main topics covered by the press during the
analysed period were identified using the topic modeling technique, which automatically extracts
the most important topics within a given collection of texts. Wordstat’s “topics extraction” function
attempts to discover the thematic structure of a collection of texts by applying a combination of
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and statistical analysis. The main statistical procedure used for
4
In detail, the number of articles per newspaper: Il Corriere della Sera 5.320, la Repubblica 1.897, Il Giornale 2.274,
ilmessaggero.it 8.429, ilfattoquotidiano.it 3.288, Huffington Post Italy 2.512.the extraction of topics in Wordstat is a factorial analysis: the extracted topics were then organized
manually in order to check the correct attribution of words and phrases to specific themes, and to
aggregate the themes that recurred more than one time.
3. The service role in the coverage of the first phase of the pandemic by the Italian press
As mentioned in the previous pages, the nature of this pandemic is a great challenge for the
information systems (Thomas, Senkpeni 2020) because on one hand information are partial and
conflicting and, on the other hand, people are more than ever seeking reliable information (Di Salvo
and Nucci, 20205). Furthermore, the unpreparedness of journalists for an event of this magnitude
presented an additional challenge for journalism. In light of the obvious difficulties faced by
journalism in covering the pandemic, especially in the initial stages, this study is focused on
understanding the role of the media in a crisis of this type, on their ability and potential to manage
the Covid-19 crisis, playing a central role in its governance. In this sense, the media, considered as
social actors (Luckmann 1966), participate in the management of emergencies because of their
ability to support, or on the contrary to criticize, social control policies and other decisions made on
the issue at stake, through their abilities to respond effectively to the unpredictability of disasters,
since they are able not only to reflect reality but also to create it (Dunwoody and Peters, 1993).
Through the identification of the main topics covered by the newspapers analyzed, therefore, we
tried to investigate which issues attracted the attention of the press in the early stages of the
pandemic and how the journalists provided information on the pandemic, how they might have
influenced the public perception of risks (Vasterman and Ruigrok 2013).
Table 1 illustrates the 27 topics mostly covered by the Italian news outlets under analysis,
with a brief description of the news contained in each topic. The topics identified clearly reproduce
the complexity of the historical moment under study and the consequent difficulties for journalism
in narrating the first stages of the spread of Covid-19. One of the central aspects of the narration of
this pandemic lies in the fact that, we are talking about a “continuous risk”, lasting in the long-term
and potentially indefinitely, making it more difficult to accept and metabolize. Pandemics, unlike
other crises, are by their nature narratives particularly difficult to manage because they do not end
up in the narration of a single or few events but are indefinite over time in search of a solution (of a
vaccine) (Sellnow et al. 2018). This “continuous narration” can be observed in the Table that
follows, on the most discussed topics in the Italian press related to the Covid-19 pandemic (Table
1).
5
Article available at https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/italy-coronavirus-and-the-media (retrieved on July 22nd 2020)Table 1 - Topics that have obtained greater coverage by the Italian press (21 February - 5 April 2020)
RANK TOPIC DESCRIPTION FREQ
1 NUMBERS OF THE INFECTION Daily update on the spread of the virus in Italy 8717
2 RED ZONES Identification and revocation of “Red Zones” on the national territory 6353
Health situation in the region most affected by the virus (Lombardia) and health emergency management (construction of new
3 HEALTH IN LOMBARDIA 5057
hospitals in Milan and Bergamo)
EUROPEAN MANAGEMENT OF THE
4 Emergency management by European institutions (economic aid, sharing of health materials, borders) 4755
VIRUS
Contagion control measures applied at national level (information on shops which may be opened, surveillance by law
5 LOCKDOWN enforcement agencies to detect violations of the lockdown measures and enactment of emergency law decrees of the Council 2934
of Ministers)
6 HOUSE ISOLATION Updates on the number of people in home isolation and on the number of people who are no longer obliged to home isolation 2830
7 ISS AND VIROLOGISTS News and statements about the virus (disease, transmission, cure, symptoms, etc.) from experts 2718
8 EXCHANGES/MARKETS Updates on the performance of exchanges and markets according to the spread of the virus in the world 2300
9 AIR TRANSPORT Decision of several airlines to cancel the connections with Italy and subsequent closure of some Italian airports 2271
Interventions in support of citizens and businesses to limit the economic damage caused by the pandemic (e.g. suspension of
10 BANKS AND LOANS 2176
the payment of loans and mortgages)
11 SELF-EMPLOYED AND VAT Economic aid for self-employed workers and VAT (600-euro bonus) 1930
12 CONTAGION IN REST HOMES Spread of contagions in rest homes 1802
Trade unions’ position on blocking some production activities (list of Ateco codes blocked and suitable for work) and on
MANAGEMENT OF THE
13 financial aid for workers; opinions of entrepreneurs and industrialists on the economic fallout of the virus and on emergency 1670
PRODUCTIVE SECTOR
management
14 SMART WORKING The novelty of smart working for public and private companies and the repercussions on families 1652
15 HOSPITAL EMERGENCY Emergency in the Intensive Care Units in various Italian regions and lack of lung ventilators 1628
16 REVOLTS IN PRISONS Revolts in prisons for the implementation of virus containment measures 1628
Suspension of teaching in schools and of educational trips, discussion on the high school final exams and reopening of
17 SCHOOL 1621
schools
PARENTAL LEAVE AND
18 Aid to tackle the closure of schools for all parents (public and private employees) 1567
BABYSITTING VOUCHERS
Debate on the possible postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and suspension of the football championship in Italy (and
19 SPORT 1421
possible rules for the resumption)
20 FUNDRAISING Fundraising launched by the celebrities Chiara Ferragni and Fedez for the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan 1407
21 DRUGS/TESTS Testing of several drugs to fight the Covid-19 symptoms 1240
Statements of the governors of the southern Italian regions and controversy over the “escape” of students and workers from
22 ESCAPE FROM THE NORTH 1167
the northern provinces with consequent expansion of the spread of the virus on the national territory
RELATIONS WITH FOREIGN
23 Relations with other European and non-European countries and the procurement of health materials from abroad 1074
COUNTRIES
24 DIAMOND PRINCESS Updates on the health situation on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, with attention to the Italian people on board 1021
25 CONTAGION IN THE COURTS Spread of the virus in Italian law courts and related measures to avoid the contagion of employees and users 968
26 CONTAGION IN ASIA Contagion trend in Asia, measures taken to contain it and for the economic recovery 724
27 OIL CRISIS Collapse of the oil price due to the pandemic 526In fact, most of the topics in the previous table, as can also be guessed from their description, tell of
a continuous event over time, of a situation in the making. Specifically, to give some concrete
examples, the articles included in the “school” topic concern the continuous prolongation of the
didactic suspension, the possibilities of reopening the schools and the different hypotheses of
carrying out the high school exams. In the same way, the articles in the “lockdown” topic concern
the succession of various law decrees promulgated by the Italian government to extend and modify
the lockdown rules. And again, the topic “sport” includes all those articles relating to the long
international discussion on the possibility of suspending and postponing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
or, at a purely national level, the debate on the possible suspension of the football championship,
first, and then of its possible recovery. From these three examples, it is possible to guess that none
of the three topics were covered in a way that is able to offer, at least in the period of time analyzed,
a sort of conclusion to the narrated event. Every day new elements emerge that change the scenario
described the previous day and therefore make the narrative of journalists continuously evolving.
In Table 1 it is also possible to find out that the Covid-19 related risk falls into the category
of “new risks” as theorized by Beck (2009): in the pandemic narrative, in fact, among the most
covered topics we find “the European management of the virus”, “exchanges/markets”, “sport”,
“fundraising”, “relations with foreign countries” and “oil crisis”; these are topics characterized by
global interconnections, linked to a new social complexity and also to a global economy. Moreover,
the topic “ISS and virologists” (ranked 7th out the 27 most covered topics identified by our study) is
characterized by a predominance of statements of the experts (doctors and virologists) about the
disease, its symptoms and possible treatment strategies, is also connected to the definition of the
Covid-19 risk proposed by Nygren and Olofsson, who defined it “a late modern complex mega risk,
where our dependence on experts is evident” (2020, p. 3).
After studying what were the most covered topics by the Italian press in the first period of the
pandemic, our attention shifts to the role of journalism in the narration of the emergency and, in
particular, on the presence of the so-called “service role for risk communication” within each
identified topic (Table 2). As anticipated in the first paragraph of this work, the service role of
journalism deals with the dissemination of indications and explanations relating to daily behaviors,
in the case under examination motivated by the need to safeguard one’s own and the others’ health,
thus identifying a common good and a public interest to be pursued (Eide, Knight 1999; Mellado,
2014, 2015; Alvear, Mellado 2018): in the case of the present study, this type of journalistic
performance can be found in the narration of the social control policies relating to the imposition of
a lockdown, restrictions on free movement and the obligation to wear masks and gloves in public
spaces. In particular, these information on the social control policies imposed by the government to
manage and reduce the spread of the virus can be found in the news articles under analysis within
the “Lockdown” and the “Red Zones” topics. Specifically, in addition to what has just been said,
the topic “Lockdown” informs citizens, for example, on which shops may be opened despite the
general closures and on the surveillance measures carried out by the public order forces to verify
possible violations of the lockdown measures. The topic “Red zones”, instead, concerns the social
control measures imposed by the government on limited areas of the country particularly hit by the
virus (so-called “red zones”, in some North-Italy provinces), in the first weeks of the management
of the pandemic (insert dates). In this case, residents in these areas were subject to greater
restrictions than the rest of the Italian population. These two topics represent a clear example of a
service role of journalism, where journalists communicate to their readers how their daily lives willbe changed by the decisions taken by the government and how their behaviors will have to be changed starting from the day they read the article in question.
Table 2 - Presence of the service role in the identified topics and examples of articles related to each topic
RANK TOPIC SERVICE ROLE EXAMPLES
There are 7960 deaths in Lombardia (+367), 1,811 in Emilia-Romagna (+79), 532 in Veneto (+33), 983 in Piemonte (+97), 503 in the
NUMBERS OF THE Marche (+26), 268 in Tuscany (+ 15), 488 in Liguria (+28), 167 in Campania (+19), 185 in Lazio (+16), 129 in Friuli Venezia Giulia
1 Yes
INFECTION (+7), 144 in Puglia (+15), 129 in the province of Bolzano (+13), 93 in Sicily (+5), 133 in Abruzzo (+10), 38 in Umbria (+1), 63 in Valle
d’Aosta (+4), 187 in Trentino (+14), 41 in Calabria (+3), 40 in Sardinia (+6), 11 in Molise (+1), 10 in Basilicata (+1).
“Red zone” extended to 14 other provinces: Parma, Piacenza, Rimini, Reggio-Emilia, Modena, Pesaro and Urbino, Venice, Padua,
2 RED ZONES Yes Treviso, Alessandria, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Novara, Vercelli and Asti. In total, these measures will affect over a quarter of the Italian
population.
The intensive cares of the hospitals of Bergamo and Brescia have physically exhausted their reception capacity, Cremona is almost
saturated. Those who are ready to be transferred can get stuck because even ambulances are not enough. OR Guido Bertolaso,
3 HEALTH IN LOMBARDIA Yes/No appointed personal consultant to the governor of Lombardy Attilio Fontana, “we called him for the new hospital of the Fiera, because
the biggest emergency is related to the beds in intensive cares. The idea of building them in a single block, 500 on two floors, optimizes
the staff and is truly an important response, a response for the country”.
A trust in Europe. Despite everything: delays, mistakes, misunderstandings, mutual mistrust, short-sightedness. Now we finally know,
by explicitly stating the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, that the Stability Pact “is suspended” and “the Italian
EUROPEAN MANAGEMENT
4 No budget can manage the crisis. End of selfishness”. The ECB has also decided on a new quantitative easing of massive size, 750 billion
OF THE VIRUS
euros of securities to buy to defeat the economic emergency triggered by the coronavirus and strengthen the foundations of the euro, in
the face of the collapse of the stock exchanges and the blaze of spreads.
From today only pharmacies, petrol stations, supermarkets, kiosks, and tobacco shops are open. And still craftsmen, plumbers, and
mechanics. Yes to deliveries of food products at home, as well as ready meals. The rest of the commercial activities are all closed. The
5 LOCKDOWN Yes latest frontier in the fight against coronavirus was announced by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte yesterday evening. OR Again, in these
eight days the police have inspected 2,366 commercial activities: it is known, all closed apart from groceries, pharmacies and para-
pharmacies. Two owners were reported for violating the decree, while five administrative penalties were imposed.
ASL Roma 4 –1 new positive case. 58 people who have left home isolation? remain under surveillance 122 OR Two doctors resulted
6 HOUSE ISOLATION Yes positive for coronavirus in ASL Rome 2. The Health and Social Health Integration Department of the Lazio Region communicates this,
explaining that 89 people have left the quarantine and 460 people are under home surveillance.
It is not flu. The numbers tell us. Intensive care units tell us. Covid-19 is not flu because it is a new enemy from an immunological point
of view and, as such, is completely unknown to our immune system. OR Ilaria Capua explains that the big question mark of the
7 ISS AND VIROLOGISTS Yes
emergency is given by the number of asymptomatic and by the role they play in the spread of the infection and in the construction of
herd immunity.
At 3 pm Piazza Affari touches new lows with the Ftse Mib which collapses by 11% after the heavy start of Wall Street. Seven titles are
8 EXCHANGES/MARKETS No suspended on the Milanese list including big names like Intesa, Eni, Enel. Also, the European stock exchanges with the pan-European
Stoxx 600 index dropped 9%: Paris sold 10%, Frankfurt 9% and London 7%.
23 plants out of the 40 main ones, among which also the second airport of Rome, Ciampino, close even if a note from the ministry
9 AIR TRANSPORT Yes stresses that it will remain available “only for state flights, organ transports, canadair and emergency services”. The flight of foreign
airlines - including low cost airlines - has led almost all structures to record declines that have never been recorded before.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, a moratorium on loans and mortgages arrives until 30 September this year. Credit lines and
10 BANKS AND LOANS Yes credit limits cannot be revoked until that date. And until September 30, as stated in the government measure, the payment of mortgage
instalments is also suspended.
From April 1st, the self-employed will be able to request the 600 euros of allowance provided for in the Cura Italia decree on the INPS
11 SELF-EMPLOYED AND VAT Yes website: those who do not already have the pin code to access the institute's electronic services can download one through a simplified
procedure that will allow remote recognition of the interested subject.
CONTAGION IN REST Coronavirus, 52 other contagions related to the retirement homes of Rieti, Contigliano and Greccio OR Coronavirus, elderly people
12 Yes
HOMES infected and left alone: the drama of rest homes OR Outbreaks in rest homes The peak in Lombardy “One guest out of ten killed”
MANAGEMENT OF THE Factories Confindustria and Cgil, Cisl, Uil (Trade unions) opposed to the obligation to stop all factories OR Chaos and behaviour:
13 Yes/No
PRODUCTIVE SECTOR Chaos reigns, Cgil, Cisl and Uil were right to ask for common lines on the behaviours to be followed.Italy is testing smart working: the benefits (and the limits) OR Coronvirus, smart working and family: the living room is the new realm
14 SMART WORKING Yes
OR SMART WORKING: Agile work becomes the ordinary way in public administration
15 HOSPITAL EMERGENCY Yes Coronavirus, a tower of the Policlinico Tor Vergata will host the third Covid Hospital in Rome: another 80 beds for the emergency
In the rest of Italy the riots in prisons had taken place immediately after the release of the decree, on the night between 8 and 9 March,
with terrible consequences. In Milan they started on the morning of the 9th and had no dramatic consequences because already two
16 REVOLTS IN PRISONS No weeks before, after the first cases of contagion on February 21st, we had ensured the triage to the prison police and volunteers, we were
working with the Region and the Healthcare of Lombardyto inform the prisoners and explain what could be expected during such an
emergency.
The new measures lengthen the suspension of teaching in schools: they will all remain closed until at least April 3, but it is not excluded
17 SCHOOL Yes
that the stop to lessons continues until after Easter or even early May.
Hypothesis babysitting voucher and parental leave - The Minister of the Family, Elena Bonetti, announced at Circo Massimo the
PARENTAL LEAVE AND hypothesis of new measures to help families, such as a vouchers “for the costs of babysitting” and “extraordinary leave for parents”.
18 Yes
BABYSITTING VOUCHERS Also, to avoid too many contacts between children and grandparents “who are so precious in the welfare of our society and today must
be protected”.
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) decided, convinced by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also because Australia and
19 SPORT No Canada had already announced the boycott. In these conditions, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics cannot be played. Postponement to 2021.
OR Coronavirus, the president of the FIGC Gravina: “I do not rule out the suspension of Serie A if a player proves positive”.
In recent days, Chiara Ferragni and her husband Fedez have promoted a fundraiser for the realization of the new intensive therapy of
20 FUNDRAISING No the “San Raffaele” Hospital in Milan: almost 4 million euros raised in 5 days, which will serve to enhance the health care for
Coronavirus patients.
«We announce the try of tocilizumab, a drug for rheumatoid arthritis; preliminary data are promising. The study will be on 330 patients
21 DRUGS/TRIALS No and will start on Thursday to evaluate the impact of the drug». This was stated by Nicola Magrini, director of Aifa, the Italian drug
agency, at the press conference on civil protection.
“I speak to you as if you were my children, my brothers, my grandchildren: Stop and go back”. So begins the post on Facebook
throughwhich the governor Michele Emiliano announces that he has signed overnight “the order to oblige those who arrive in Puglia
ESCAPE FROM THE
22 Yes from Lombardy and the 14 northern provinces to the quarantine”. The decision of several regional administrators in the center-south
NORTH
such as Jole Santelli (Calabria), Vincenzo De Luca (Campania), Marco Marsilio (Abruzzo), Enrico Rossi (Tuscany), Nello Musumeci
(Sicily), Donato Toma (Molise), Vito Bardi (Basilicata) is similar.
“We will use military flights to collect masks in China”. This was announced by Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio. Between today and
RELATIONS WITH
23 No tomorrow 4 million (masks) will arrive. OR Foreign Minister Di Maio announces that “a communication campaign to promote the
FOREIGN COUNTRIES
Made in Italy will be launched in the coming days”.
After 3 weeks of quarantine off the coast of Yokohama, all passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship were evacuated. The
24 DIAMOND PRINCESS No Australian was the first to report the news. As for the crew, before returning home they will have to wait for the result of the test:
among these is Gennaro Arma, 44-year-old Italian commander.
The virus in the Courts: third case in Milan, first in Naples - In Milan there is a third case at the House of Justice: it is a deputy attorney
CONTAGION IN THE general. The entire General Prosecutor's Office, on the third floor of the Court, was closed, as was a Court of Appeal Chamber where a
25 Yes
COURTS session had been held. The sanitization of the entire building is underway, for this reason it will be closed on the weekend. All the
activity of justice is conditioned by the health emergency
26 CONTAGION IN ASIA No Coronavirus, the “positive” dog from Hong Kong is dead. OR “Helicopter money” in Hong Kong to exit the crisis: $ 1,300 per adult
Reprisal of Saudi Arabia, which decided to increase the supply of crude oil after OPEC received a niet from Russia on the production
27 OIL CRISIS No
cut proposed by the producers' association. And oil, already penalized by the coronavirus risk, sank.Another example of service role performed by the Italian journalists in the coverage of the pandemic can be found in the topics “Banks and loans”, “Self-employed and VAT” and “Parental leave and babysitting vouchers”. In these cases, the core of the narrative are not the government’s social control measures anymore, but governmental aids designed to help workers during the pandemic. In the case of “Banks and loans”, the articles concern the interventions in support of citizens and business activities to limit the economic damage caused by the pandemic, such as the suspension of payments of loans and mortgages. The articles that can be grouped under the other two topics, namely “Self-employed and VAT” and “Parental leave and babysitting vouchers”, refer to the state economic aids for self-employed workers and VAT: the government, in the period under analysis, was working on a one-off bonus of EUR 600 for these two categories of workers, on childcare measures for parents whose children could not go to school anymore(e.g. vouchers to pay for the babysitting service and extraordinary leave to be able to stay at home with the children). As said before, the performance of a service role in journalism, however, in case of risk situations like the one we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic, could be characterized by a media representation of the pandemic rich in emotions such as anxiety and fear to increase the perception of social vulnerability (Eide, Knight 1999; Turner et al. 2003) and induce the readers to change their behaviors so as not to become a potential victim and to avoid suffering. This is the case for topics that emerged through in our study, like “Numbers of the infection”, “Home isolation”, “Contagion in rest homes”, “Hospital emergency” and, in part, “Contagion in the courts” and “Contagion in Asia”, all topics in which the feeling of vulnerability has increased with the “mathematization” of the catastrophe, that is to say a narrative widely described in quantitative and numerical terms, through “alarmist frames” (Vasterman, Ruigrok 2013). In these topics, the media coverage is totally or almost totally dedicated to a continuous repetition of data on infections, hospitalizations, intensive care beds, cures and deaths caused by Covid-19, as it can also be observed in some of the examples reported in Table 2. The great attention of the press to the “mathematization” of risk can be linked to what Altheide calls “politics of fear” (2006), intended as a conjunction of the symbolic politics of the commercial media and that of the leaders and political institutions. Looking at the Italian context, competition on the market may have mixed the already existing media partisanship with dramatization, exaggerating the tones and language used in the news to reach and maintain a politically segmented audience (Mancini 2013). In the next paragraph, we will analyze in detail the coverage of the 27 topics listed above made by each of the news outlets under investigation, in order to understand if the close relationship between journalism and politics typical of the Italian media system influenced the way the Covid-19 pandemic was covered and if the social control policies put in place by the government represented an opportunity to attack the authorities in power in the context of the Italian press. 4. The Italian press: a partisan report of the Covid-19 pandemic As anticipated, power relations in Italy are characterized by a range of strongly polarized and conflicting political contacts, together with a lack of consensus on the basic structure of the social order (Sartori 1976). Furthermore, partisanship and polarization are two of the main characteristics of the Italian media system (Hallin, Mancini 2004). The polarized nature of the Italian media system combined with the new and hybrid nature of the Covid-19 risk has led, in some cases, to the reproduction of old journalistic features, where “almost all Italian media are biased in their content” and “seek to take an active part in the decision-making process by setting the symbolic context
within which this process takes place” (Mancini 2013). Clearly, these characteristics clash with the
service journalism paradigm analyzed in the previous paragraph, which is characterized by a more
objective coverage, functional to the needs of the readers in their daily choices and behaviors. Our
data, in fact, tell us that even in the occasion of the pandemic, the main Italian newspapers were
unable to provide a coherent and shared interpretation of the events, even if, as was foreseeable
given the high newsworthiness of the event, the health emergency was the central issue discussed
by all newspapers during the first weeks of the Covid-19 emergency.
An in-depth analysis of the different coverage made by the six news outlets under analysis
of the topics related to the virus reveals a fragmentation of the narration of the pandemic, due to the
different characteristics of each individual newspaper and to the different expectations of their
target audiences. The differences between the historically most attentive to political debate and
comment-oriented newspapers, such as La Repubblica and Il Giornale, emerge quite clearly: these
two outlets in particular together with the Huffinghton Post Italy, dedicated great coverage to
questions related to the European management of the virus, expressing their position on the
measures discussed to deal with the economic crisis. The online version of Il Messaggero was,
among the analyzed newspapers, focusing the most on the “Numbers of the infection”, providing
daily accurate data on the spread of the virus in the geographical areas covered by its local editorial
offices. A certain “local vocation” also emerges in Il Corriere della Sera which, because of its
editorial venue (Milan), dedicates greater attention to issues related to the difficult situation in the
region of Lombardy (Milan’s region), speaking about the problems of contagion linked to the
critical issues of the “red zones”, about contagions in retirement homes and about the management
of intensive care units in the hospitals (with the latter topic very critically followed by the online
version of Il Fatto Quotidiano).
Analyzing in detail the extracts obtained from each of the 27 topics identified, it emerges that for
some of these the narration by the Italian press was schizophrenic and partisan. A schizophrenic,
very quickly changing coverage of the ongoing events can be found in the following headlines: on
February 22, the main opening titles of some newspapers denounced an emergency situation, “The
Virus in Italy. One person dead in Veneto” (Il Virus in Italia. Un morto in Veneto) (Corriere della
Sera); "Virus. Fear in the North” (Virus. Il Nord nella paura) (la Repubblica); “Italy infected”
(Italia infetta) (Il Giornale). Only five days later (February 27), the same newspapers radically
changed their position opening with: "OMS: Italy is good. Stop panicking” (L’Oms: Bene l’Italia.
Basta panico) (Corriere della Sera); "Let’s re open Milan" (Riapriamo Milano) (la Repubblica);
“The wind changes and perhaps the government too” (Cambia il vento e forse anche il Governo) (Il
Giornale). Finally, just four days later they headlines emotionally related to panic were back again
(March 2): "The EU faces the emergency" (La Ue affronta l’emergenza) (Corriere della Sera);
“Seven days to stop it” (Sette giorni per fermarlo) (la Repubblica); “Hurry up” (Fate presto) (Il
Giornale). In addition to the quick change of headlines (and topic), each newspaper often covered
these issues favoring positions that are more functional to them, closer to their political orientation,
therefore tending more in favor or against the decisions taken by the government. The management
of the Covid-19 emergency therefore becomes an opportunity for confrontation, attack, proposing a
partisan interpretation of the facts reported capable of putting in a bad light the political actors and
public figures each newspaper usually criticizes, as confirmed by the extracts below (topic “Health
in Lombardy”):You can also read
