How the Tangentopoli Corruption Scandal Turbocharged Italian Media Populism

The final session at the I-POLHYS 2024 symposium in Bologna starts with Marco Mazzoni, whose focus is on media populism – and he centres his presentation on the politicisation of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal as a media event in the early 1990s, which became the starting-point of media populism in Italy.

The scandal evolved during 1992-4, and ended the careers of several prominent politicians. It started with the arrest of a local politician, Mario Chiesa, in Milan, but was transformed into a national media event when the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party Bettino Craxi was drawn into the scandal. This naturally attracted mainstream national media attention, but there were both endogenous and exogenous factors in this.

Exogenous factors included popular frustration with the international perception of Italy as corrupt, with adverse economic developments after the sighting of the EU’s Maastricht treaty, with continuing Mafia attacks on prosecutors, and with the rise of the Lega as a political force in northern Italy. However, there were also endogenous factors within the mass media: changes in broadcast media schedules, the introduction of new logics of commercialisation, the emergence of infotainment, and the advent of new television formats with active audience participation.

All of this combined to the transformation of Tangentopoli into a commercial product, serialised like a soap opera and accompanied by talk shows that showcased audience anger and enabled popular debate about the scandal. Time spent with television, and money invested in television advertising, also increased substantially during this time, but some new print publications also profited substantially by growing their audiences. And this set the standard for populist Italian media coverage of political scandal ever since.