“One Cannot Remain Silent”. Divergent paradigms in Italian political journalism in the face of news weaponization.

Against the backdrop of the widespread rise of radical right parties (RRP: Mudde 2007), I explore the political instrumentalization of gender violence across two core organs of political representation: electoral competition, and journalism as an enterprise for the discursive representation of political reality (Hallin 1989). RRP’s political repertoires combine ethnocentric nationalism with a conservative stance over gender issues (Wodak and Khosravinik 2013). These motives, often conveyed in rule-breaking manners (Bracciale and Martella 2017), constitute a hotspot in the tense dialectic between RRP and legacy journalism. To explore this issue, I qualitatively analyze the journalistic coverage of a core moment of the 2022 Italian election campaign. In August 2022, far-right leader Giorgia Meloni shared on Twitter the video of a Ukrainian woman being raped by a Guinean asylum seeker in the streets of Piacenza, conveying an anti-immigrant message. This illustrates how RRP’s gender-conservatism materializes not only in the de-prioritization of women’s rights, but also in the electoral instrumentalization of gender violence (Hawkesworth 2023) - furthermore, pursued by a female candidate to political leadership (Siow 2023). An intersectionality perspective is also pertinent: the victim was herself an immigrant, which made her more prone to being objectified (Yuval-Davis 1997; Spini 2019) and shielded those who exposed her from the accusation of being tout court xenophobic. Italian journalists widely covered the episode, although in different ways. Some outlets displayed a contextualized and analytical take over Meloni's narrative and the problematic facets of her gesture. Other outlets risked mainstreaming rather than debunking Meloni's narrative, centering their coverage of the incident on its political weaponization rather than on an analysis of the events themselves. This was exacerbated by audience-oriented logics that incentivized journalists to capitalize on the episode’s triggering nature (Ekström, Patrona, and Thornborrow 2022): several articles further exposed the rape victim through the re-circulation/re-evocation of the video; journalists were more likely to personally attack Meloni rather than to reflect on causes and implications of women’s and migrants’ vulnerability. Documenting these contradictions, I discuss which response strategies emerge from the Italian journalistic field