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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (42)
This paper considers the use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies, arguing that the concept of hybridity has served an important role in reorienting the field in the face of important processes of social change, but that as a “sensitizing concept” in the sense that Herbert Blumer used the term, it requires critical reflection and more...
Immigration is a dramatic challenge for Europe: the press has a large influence in determining the opinion climate at this regard. This article investigates how a selection of newspapers in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy covers the immigration issue from 1 January 2013 to 30 April 2014, before and after the Lampedusa shipwreck on 3...
News media can be considered to fulfil their democratic role as a “marketplace of ideas” only if they present a diverse content that gives space to a wider range of ideas and viewpoints. But how can content diversity be assessed? And what determines actor and viewpoint diversity in the first place? By employing measurements of actor and viewpoint d...
As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 article...
In this article we review research published since the publication of Comparing Media Systems which seeks to operationalize concepts discussed in that work and to test the framework proposed there or to put forward alternatives or revisions. We focus on works that deal with the original 18 countries covered in Comparing Media Systems, and consider...
By comparing media reporting of the 2009 swine flu pandemic in Sweden, Italy, and the United Kingdom, this paper illustrates general aspects of the three countries’ journalism cultures. We argue that the coverage of a specific issue, such as swine flu, may reveal more general aspects of the place of journalism in society, i.e. the specific notions...
This contribution is organized along two main interpretive lines. First: the Italian public sphere is very polarized because of well-established historical attitudes, a crowded media market and new technologies that push towards segmentation of the audience. The arrival of Berlusconi has only reinforced the already existing polarization that goes w...
This paper discusses the possible consequences of mass media fragmentation over the structure and the functioning of democracy. Media fragmentation and audience segmentation are not new but they greatly increased in the very last years because of the long ongoing tendency towards commercialization and mostly because of the development of new media...
I examine the possible differences between the concept of media instrumentalization and political parallelism. In the first part of this paper, I aim to reconstruct the history of the concept of political parallelism that derives from Seymour-Ure's concept of party parallelism. I will then discuss why and how party parallelism has transformed into...
This article discusses the possible ambiguities that exist between three different words: personalization, presidentialization and leader. In recent times, and mostly in Europe, the first two words have been used very frequently by media scholars and political scientists to point out changes taking place both in the decision-making process and in t...
Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove...
Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove...
Long before a politician opens his mouth to speak in public, his words have been filtered through a team of public relations experts, communications consultants, and campaign assistants. When did politiciansâ speeches stop being their own? And who are these professional communicators who fine-tune messages to suit the demands of electoral strateg...
A powerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater similarity in the way the public sphere is structured across the world. In their products, in their professional practices and cultures, in their systems of relationships with other political and social institutions, media systems across the world are becoming increasingly alike. Poli...
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democra...
Gegenwärtig beobachten wir tiefgreifende Entwicklungen im Sinne einer Angleichung der Strukturierung von Öffentlichkeit in verschiedenen Ländern. Dahinter stehen zwei Prozesse: Zum einen werden sich Mediensysteme in ihren Produkten, ihrem professionellen Handeln, journalistischen Kulturen sowie ihrer Beziehungen zu anderen politischen und sozialen...
Developments in telecommunications (e.g., television, computers, the Internet) and other technologies, combined with accelerating processes of social change, have fundamentally altered the character of political parties and government. These fundamental changes are seen in the ascendancy of a new form of political professionalthe technical expert w...
Recent forms of television diplomacy — the Reagan/Gorbatchev meetings of 1985, 1987, 1988, for example — can be interpreted using two perspectives. The "media events" paradigm, is built on a Durkheimian theory of societal integration, and on Victor Turner's theory of rituals. The "public sphere" paradigm, is largely derived from the work of Jürgen...
This article deals with the news gathering activity of Italian political journalists. Their interaction with information sources develops within a framework of constant ambivalence between trust and suspicion. Political journalists resolve this ambivalence through a problem-solving activity which implies a phase of negotiation with politicians and...
This article examines the impact of cultural, ideological and scientific factors on Italian mass communication research from its origins in the 1960s to the present. Relatively constant influences have included (a) a strong tendency among scholars to social involvement, facilitating normative approaches, (b) a debate over general theoretical issues...
The concept of `para-social interaction' has chiefly been applied to entertainment materials. Following suggestions from Goffman, from the pragmatics of Palo Alto and from other approaches in discourse analysis, this article draws attention to the interactional strategies and devices often embedded in television news. It outlines a set of `meta-dis...
This article discusses the combination of influences on the focus and direction of Italian media research after its beginnings over thirty years ago, through the 1970s and up to and including current research efforts. During the 1950s and 1960s, Catholic culture was a strong influence and this combined with normative goals in the research commissio...
