Spectacularization and Instrumentalization of Political Corruption Scandals in Italian Press

According to Thompson (2000), the concept of scandal can be summarized as “actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response”. To be more detailed, Thompson lists some features that make an occurrence as a scandal: it has to involve the transgression of values, norms or moral codes; it has to be secret but, at the same time, has to be known by other actors which disapprove the misconduct and make it public. According to this definition, to be considered as a scandal, a common misdemeanor has to be made known to the public opinion, in other words has to be spread by media. Therefore, mass media play an important role in the construction of scandals, making it public, narrating it like a story and inspiring discussions and disapproval. Some scholars call it “mediated scandals”, which do not exist independently of media but they are constituted by mediated forms of communication (Thompson 2000; Canel, Sanders 2006). This paper, inspired by my participation in the project co-funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program: Anticorruption Policies Revisited. (ANTICORRP), tries to analyze the press coverage of political scandals related to corruptive behaviors in Italy through the analysis of four Italian case studies: “Fini’s Villa in Montecarlo”; “Formigoni case”; “Sesto San Giovanni case”; “Cinzia gate”. All of these cases are well-known in Italy and were extensively treated by Italian press. The first two cases concern two centre-right politicians, the latter two are about centre-left politicians. These cases study will be analyzed in three Italian newspapers: Corriere della Sera, the most diffused Italian newspaper that does not have a clear political affiliation; La Repubblica, the most important centre-leftist newspaper and Il Giornale, the most important centre-rightist newspaper. First of all, I want to evaluate the consistence of cases. It will be evaluated through some parameters identified from literature (Entman 2012; Lang, Lang 1983): “duration”; “prominence” and “resonance” of the scandal. The first one indicates for how many times the scandal has been covered by media, the second one means placement on the front page of newspapers and the latter refers to the framing of scandal made by journalists. Secondly I want to conduct a content analysis of articles related to these cases study through a code book, whit the aim of investigating the process of spectacularization and instrumentalization of corruption scandals in Italy. One of the main assumption this study starts from is that the political personalization process affects also scandals discourse, producing dramatization and spectacularization in corruption scandals coverage, highlighting exotic and strange behaviors maybe with amorous affair bearing, also affecting the so called “private sphere” (Stanyer 2013). Moreover, Italian media system is characterized by a strong political polarization and journalism is affected by political influences (Hallin, Mancini 2004). For this reason, in our country, the features of media system can push investigative journalism to turn a corruption scandal into an opportunity to attack someone.