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Abstract
Through two case studies on TV and press journalism in Italy in 2012 we explore the representation of youth with a migrant background and of the jus soli issue in the country. We show that, in 2012, thanks also to the debate on jus soli, youth with a migrant background has found a greater representation than in the past in some Italian journalism, especially in State television newscasts and centre and left-wing newspapers. However, in most cases, this coverage presents young people of migrant background either as fundamentally different from or as completely identical to autochthonous youth. Moreover, the young are presented almost always in their individual, biographic dimensions, and the voice on specific political issues remains the monopoly of the autochthonous.
Acknowledgements
The article is the result of a collaborative work; however Filomena Gaia Farina is the main author of paragraphs 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, while Djordje Sredanovic is the main author of paragraphs 3, 7 and 8. This article originated from a larger research project on the representation of migrants and minorities in Italian journalism in 2012, promoted by the Carta di Roma Association. Part of the data here presented have been published in Notizie fuori dal ghetto. Primo rapporto annuale Associazione Carta di Roma, Roma: Edizioni Ponte Sisto. We wish to thank the Carta di Roma Association and the other scholars working at the overall research project of which these data are one of the results – Marinella Belluati, Marco Bruno and Pina Lalli. We also wish to thank Annalisa Frisina and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the article. However, the full responsibility of the article remains ours, and in particular, the article should not be interpreted as expressing the opinions of Carta di Roma.
Notes
[1] In Italy some boys and girls with a migrant background decided to repurpose this definition and use it in a creative way to bring forward political, social and cultural demands. As we can read in the ‘Network G2’ website: ‘G2 – Second-generation – Network is a national non-party and apolitical organization founded by migrants’ sons and migrants’ daughters born and/or raised up in Italy. G2 Network participants call themselves “sons of immigrants” instead of “immigrants”’. ‘G2 does not mean for us “second-generation immigrants” but “the second-generation of immigration”, because we consider immigration a process that transforms Italy, from generation to generation’ (G2 – Seconde Generazioni Citation2012). In this article we decided to use the locution ‘young boys and girls from migrant background’ or ‘youth with migrant background’.
[2] On the first level the analysis is based on the news reports identified in the Teche Rai (the RAI digital archive) with a keyword search. Starting from these news reports we looked at the ‘Centro di ascolto dell'informazione’ website database news reports that appeared in the Mediaset networks on the same date and with the same subject. The news reports were subject to a qualitative analysis in which labels, interpretations and meanings were attributed to each portion of the text and to images.
[3] We decided to exclude news about gender violence and news about girls involved in the TV star system (singers, dancers, models, and so on), as, although both abound in TV news, such news falls outside the direct interest of this article.