The Discursive Constitution of Mafia Journalism as a Network Beat

ABSTRACT

The article is an exploratory investigation of Italian journalists who cover issues that deal with organized crime of mafia type. It investigates their accounts of practices, organizations, and relationships with sources. Utilizing an institutional discursive approach it presents an investigation and interpretation of mafia journalism as a discursive newsbeat. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 journalists working for Italy-based regional and national news outlets. Through the journalists’ accounts, the article discusses a working definition of mafia journalism. The article explains that being a mafia journalist is a social dimension balanced between journalists’ discursive conceptions of their work and practices targeted on mafia journalism. The use of the term network beat is justified by the common habits and professional practices mafia journalists have, their relationships, and often their mutual help.

KEYWORDS:

• Mafia
• organized crimes
• discursive institutionalism
• network beat
• sources
• threats

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Nando Dalla Chiesa for his help and for encouraging me to study this topic. I also want to thank every journalist who gave me their time.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To understand the role of mafias in the Italian economic, social and political context, but also their relevance in social sciences, see the edit recent by Allum, Marinaro, and Sciarrone (2019). They also note that “there is a long tradition of books in English that trace the development of Italian mafias especially in the run-up to the great moment of crisis of 1992–1994, when the Sicilian Cosa Nostra embarked on a terror campaign against the Italian state, when the political system collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals, when a new set of actors and strategies for dealing with mafias began to emerge” (Allum, Marinaro, and Sciarrone 2019, 1). Nevertheless, very few works have unravelled the dramatic changes that have occurred in the quarter-century since then. Their book is just an attempt to fill that gap.

2 Although the study analyses only a small portion of those discourses, linked to the specific purposes of the research reported, they obviously shape a larger group of elements and products that include public speeches, books, documents, different kinds of interviews, and so on.

3 According to a couple of journalists, who cover prominent roles in their newsroom, interviewed during 2021 to clarify furtherly some issues about the Italian beat division, the ongoing reorganization in terms of convergence between digital and non-digital products is restoring and reinforcing the beat division. It is a trend that must monitor in the future.

4 During the early 1990s, Italy witnessed a violent resurgence of mafia activity. In that period, two of the most important magistrates investigating the mafia were killed: Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone. Thereafter the mafia is said to have totally changed (Bolzoni 2018a; Ciconte 2019) and so too did the journalism that works on mafia related issues (Bolzoni 2018b).

5 Four main types of Italian mafias are generally recognized: Cosa Nostra, Camorra, ’Ndrangheta and Apulian mafias. Although their activities are generally traceable to Italy, a stable mafia presence is reported in a few developed countries: mainly Germany, Canada, Australia, and the United States (see Calderoni et al. 2016).

6 In Italy the “Ossigeno per l’informazione—Oxygen for news” association monitors how many journalists suffer forms of intimidation. The association’s data determine that, from April 2020 to June 2020, 123 journalists experienced various forms of intimidation. Such attacks were directed against many different journalists and media outlets. Beyond physical attacks, those threats have also the symbolic power to change journalists’ ability to present themselves as authoritative sources of information.

7 In 2020 the “Observatory on Journalism” of the “Italian communication agency” (AGCOM) wrote a report that does not provide estimates on mafia journalists, but on the overall configuration of Italian journalists. The report is available at this link. Accessed 20 May 2021. https://www.agcom.it/documents/10179/20594011/Documento±generico±23-11-2020/41f9490a-44bd-4c61-9812-bf721b5c7cfe?version=1.0.

8 “Liti temerarie” are denunciations whereby the denouncer is aware that he will lose the case in court. Nevertheless, the journalist must undergo a trial and must defend himself in this process, not infrequently by paying the expenses at least initially,

9 This observation is based on the evidence that in international scientific journals dealing with journalism (we considered Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, International Journal of Press/Politics, journals that publish nearly 60 articles per year) “mafia journalism” is almost non-existent. This research, which has a purely exploratory value, was carried out by interrogating the archives with the following keywords: mafia, organized crime, criminal networks, and trafficking networks.