Media 1

The Italian media has increasingly promoted negative portrayal of stereotyped images of immigrants. And following the emerging trend often criticized in a neo-liberalized and increasingly fiscally-conservative settings that commonly see large-scale corporatization of news media organization, decrease in government funding for public news institution and a general deterioration of journalism standard often characterized by the dangerous conflation of opinions and information, these news coverage on immigrants in Italy are primarily of a sensationalist and alarmist nature. News reports brazenly linked legal immigration and undocumented (clandestine) entry to Italy, thereby transforming all immigrants into ‘illegals’, ‘criminals’ or ‘threats’. The effect has been successful as opinion polls show upward trends that confirm such generalizations among the public.

Studies on mass media consistently show that news coverage of immigrants are focused on criminal episodes. The everyday aspects of integration and the sheer difficulty involved in going through this deliberately made cumbersome legal process does not appear in communications. Research carried out by Cotesta (1999) revealed that nearly half the articles dealing with the presence of immigrants in Italy concerned incidents of conflict and only one-third was devoted to some in-depth analysis of their living conditions.

Languages used in newspaper titles and articles are derogative in tone and include such terminologies as ‘Albanians’, ‘immigrant’, ‘arrested’, ‘public force’, ‘clandestine’, ‘extracomunitari’, ‘drugs’, ‘Moroccan, ‘refugee’, ‘stranieri’ (foreigners). They are selected to arouse and reinforce a pre-existing anti-immigrant sentiment. To further reiterate the perceived conflict to national identity, the ethnic, racial and national identity of groups or individuals involved are reffered to by the media whenever possible in arrests or accusations.

Italians has always demonstrated a weak sense of nation hood going as far back to the early unification efforts of the liberal regime in the 19th century. The early Italian nation was formed as an uneasy amalgamation of several earlier states (Italian and non-Italian) and its legitimacy has frequently been challenged even by internal forces such as the Roman Catholic Church. The lack of nationalism is further exasperated by disparate economic conditions across its geography with the north relatively more industrialized and the south more rural and poor. Thus the weakly institutionalized sense of nationhood can easily be manipulated in face of a resurgent national conservatism ideology with the news media presenting the immigrants as a threat to Italian ‘national identity’. As a matter of fact, the growing Muslim population re-signifies religion as an identity market for the collective national identity. The effect is an increasingly between cultural and religious differences in news coverage and in issues pertinent to religious and cultural rights where they become ambivalent at best. The media discourse asserts that diversity is a threat to social cohesion and national culture. It is one thing to tolerate immigration on a personal level, but on the societal level, they pose an insurmountable challenge.