How Italian Journalists Understand and Engage with Political Polarisation

It’s a lovely Thursday in spring in Bologna, and I’m here at the renaissance Palazzo Ercolani for the opening of the concluding symposium of the I-POLHYS project on polarisation in hybrid systems. We start with Sergio Splendore and, whose focus is on journalists’s perceptions of polarisation.

He builds here on political science definitions of polarisation as different groups moving apart towards opposite extremes, or single groups coming together around a single extreme view; but do actors in polarised systems themselves actually understand the concept that way? Other definitions of polarisation focus on the ideological and affective aspects of polarisation, and these two may be contested. All of them have tended to emerge from the US, which is fine for what it is – but this also means they may translate only poorly to other political and media systems around the world.

Similarly, the focus in polarisation studies tends to be on citizens’ attitudes (or users’ attitudes, in a digital and social media context), and more recently there have been pronounced concerns about the impact of digital media use and engagement on polarisation dynamics; but a better focus here might be to examine the entire contemporary hybrid media system from established legacy to emerging digital media.

A particular focus here, Sergio suggests, should be on journalists: how do they understand polarisation; how polarised are they and their outlets themselves; how do they shape their coverage in response to the polarisation patterns in society that they perceive; and how does this affect the quality and trustworthiness of their journalism? The present study focusses on Italian journalists, conducting 40 interviews with prominent political journalists for major print, broadcast, and digital news outlets in 2021 (i.e, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).

Journalists’ views of polarisation aligned mostly with a conflict-centred understanding of the concept as ‘groups moving apart from each other towards opposite extremes’, and in this saw no clear distinction between elite and mass polarisation. They did also identify a sense of media polarisation (i.e. between media outlets), and openly pointed to the divergent editorial and political lines of different outlets, which are often adopted in response to what positions other news outlets take.

They navigate such polarisation through a variety of strategies: mitigating polarisation (by presenting multiple sides of an argument, giving voice to experts, using official and verified sources, drawing on interviews and direct quotations, and avoiding any personal opinion); aligning to polarisation (setting up situations e.g. in talk shows where the different perspectives get to argue with each other); nurturing polarisation (partly in order to make the news product more attractive to audiences by nurturing political conflict); creating polarisation (inviting extreme voices); and ignoring polarisation (taking it for granted).

This shows that polarisation plays a role in journalists’ practices, and that they have a common understanding of what the concept means to them – but also that they have an ambivalent view towards it: from working towards depolarisation by mitigating it to actively encouraging it for commercial purposes. Nurtured in this way, such polarisation then enlarges the sphere of what is understood as legitimate controversy – and this is problematic.