The news, social media and politics in the locked storytelling of migration in Italy
BRIDGES Working Paper nº 32 (January 2024)
Migrations involve millions of people in Italy and have become a fundamental pillar of the country’s workforce, demographic and social security balance, as well as one of the key issues in the political debate. The way they are told therefore affects everyone, directly or indirectly. This working paper highlights some of the main features and key points of the narratives on migration conveyed by the media. Media stories are indeed the most effective means of orienting the public, influencing at the same time the way the phenomenon is discussed and handled in the hybrid media system (in the sense of including traditional and social media: Chadwick 2013), in the political scenario, by “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010) and in civil society.
While taking into account the extensive literature available on the topic (for quantitative investigations, see the Rome Charter reports and Binotto et al. 2016), this text is based on three case studies designed to investigate narratives not only as stories, but also and above all as a process of elaboration and circulation of the stories themselves. In other words, we don’t just examine narratives about immigration and their circulation, but we also look at the reasons why some narratives have become dominant over others, and what makes them more pervasive, binding or long-lasting. To this end, we studied three cases that are characterised by a heterogeneous mix of features that allow us to examine different contexts of narrative production (for a detailed analysis of each of the three cases, see Maneri et al. 2023). They concern the first challenge to the “closed ports” policy called for by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, with the disembarkation of 53 refugees rescued by the NGO Sea Watch in Lampedusa at the end of June 2019 (Giuliani and Panic 2022; Sampugnaro 2020; see also De Blasio, Palillo and Selva 2023); the debate in June 2017 on the (subsequently failed) reform of the citizenship law on the occasion of its discussion in the Senate, fraught with identity issues inscribed in political and cultural narratives; and, finally, the attempted white supremacist massacre in Macerata by Luca Traini in February 2018, in the midst of the election campaign, on the occasion of which conflicting narratives based on often implicit notions of deserving and undeserving victims emerged (Maneri and Quassoli 2020; see also Binotto, Nobile and Rega 2020).
Despite their uniqueness, the three cases we have studied share some common features that reveal a system of long-term representation that, with specific variations, is in a sense independent of the event itself. Focusing on these common features does not, of course, mean ignoring the political context in which the events took place, which was characterised by a return to the politicisation of the migration issue, and thus its salience and polarisation. This context took shape with the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015-16, after years of relative inactivity marked by economic-financial concerns and the technical government of Mario Monti, in office until 2013.
For each case study, we collected and then quantitatively and qualitatively analysed all the relevant news items (306 in total) published during the period of maximum focus by three major national newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Fatto Quotidiano and il Giornale) and two television news programmes in their prime time editions (TG1 and TG5), with the aim of representing different political orientations and ownership models. In addition, for each case we analysed the 100 most retweeted messages on the topic in the same period on Twitter, the platform most integrated with traditional media and where politically active personalities try to spread opinions and transmit emotions through their comments and narratives (Papacharissi 2016). We also collected 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists, politicians and activists involved in covering the events and the debates surrounding them. Where the data are quantifiable, we present a comparison with five other European countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and Hungary) where the same types of events have been studied according to a common methodology within the European BRIDGES project, coordinated by Blanca Garcés and Ferruccio Pastore.1
In this article, we argue that the way in which narratives about migrants have been structured and polarised obscures significant aspects of migration, conveys an idea of Italianness based on the purity of ancestry and denies the possibility of giving voice to migrants, thus contributing to their dehumanisation. Furthermore, we argue that some political strategies – namely those used by right-wing political forces in these specific years – have been more successful than others, for reasons related both to the now consolidated structure of migration narratives and to the logics of journalistic production and remediation of texts posted on social media.
Notes:
1-https://www.bridges-migration.eu/. See in particular the comparative report (Maneri 2023).