A Short Honeymoon. The Italian Press and the Coverage of the Government’s Strategic Communication on COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic are key drivers of strategic communication. Governments must implement communication strategies for ensuring the well-being of citizens, to enforce social control policies responding to a health emergency. Choosing Italy as case study, this analysis focuses on the press coverage of the government’s strategic communication of such policies, during two different pandemic waves in 2020, evaluating if the press supported or hindered it. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified which criteria of newsworthiness have influenced news media coverage. In other words, our focus will not be strategic communication per se, but on agenda setting. By understanding the COVID-19-related agenda of newspaper discussions, we will be able to assess whether and how “news values” have influenced the media coverage of the government’s strategic communication, and how this has influenced the perception of citizens. Our results offer a contrasting picture: during the first wave, a sort of “honeymoon” between the institutions and the press emerges. During the second wave instead, the journalistic routines of the Italian media system- partisanship and conflictual narrations- influenced the narration of the pandemic, undermining the effectiveness of the strategic communication of Covid-19 social control policies.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The press coverage of the emergency is not a single entity and includes different approaches to the issue by various media outlets. However, in studies on agenda setting, coverage is considered in an aggregate form, allowing us to assess the main topics of discussion in general, and to deduce the prevailing discussion on the issue.

² The Five Stars Movement is an Italian political party considered to be populist, anti-establishment and whose stances range from typically rightist (e.g., anti-immigration policies) to typically leftist (e.g., environmentalism and citizens’ income).

³ More specifically, articles per newspaper in the first wave: Il Corriere della Sera 4.773; la Repubblica 1.859; Il Giornale 2.075; ilmessaggero.it 6.049; ilfattoquotidiano.it 4.996; Huffington Post Italy 2.025; in the second wave, Il Corriere della Sera 2.257, la Repubblica 1.655, Il Giornale 1.604, ilmessaggero.it 4.584, ilfattoquotidiano.it 2.370, Huffington Post 1.752.

⁴ SWG survey (7–13 December 2020), RADAR, Niente sarà più come prima, CAWI.

⁵ This tendency was outlined also by studies on the coverage of the SARS crisis, e.g., Yan et al., 2006.

⁶ CENSIS, 54 rapporto sulla situazione sociale del paese/2020.

⁷ SWG (19–25 October 2020), RADAR, Niente sarà più come prima. CATI, CAMI, CAWI.