Cristiana Sandeva
University of Amsterdam
BA Media and Information
Final Thesis
Supervising Professor Bogna Konior
“We are all on the same boat”
-
The Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean:
«S'ode ... passa la Fiumana dell'umanità
genti correte ad ingrossarla. Il restarsi è delitto
[...]
La fiumana dell'Umanità assetata di
giustizia - di quella giustizia conculcata fin qui
e che ora miraggio lontano splende.»
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«You can hear it… the Human River is passing
People run and go swell it. Standing still is an offense
[...]
It is the Human River, hungry for
justice - for that justice till now violated
which now shines as a faraway vision. »
Abstract
The “migrant crisis” in the Mediterranean is a topic which is of prime relevance to both local and global politics at the present time. Throughout this paper, the mediatic portrayal of this issue by Italian media will be addressed and analyzed, both in terms of its visual/verbal representation, and in comparison with factual statistical data about it. The mediatic
depiction of the “migrant crisis” is a topic widely tackled within academia, but there is a gap between reporting the issue and analyzing the implications brought about by specific ways of reporting it. This is the gap which this paper aims at filling.
The sources and methods used will be both theoretical and empirical, working the findings out through a balanced blend of historical facts, official statistical data and academic
publications. The main theories on which the research will be based will be those of Umberto Eco’s “eternal fascism”, post-truth theory, Slavoj Zizek’s idea of the “populist temptation” and Neil Postman’s analysis of “public discourse in the age of show-business”.
A qualitative and quantitative analytical approach will be taken to report data and a blended analysis of the two will be brought forward to lead to the final conclusions.
The final results will show that there is a certain recurrent visual and verbal narrative and this given narrative will be questioned by placing it within the framework of historical and
statistical data. At the end, further questions and points will be raised and addressed once the core issue is satisfactorily tackled. Eventually, new insights to continue research on the subject will be suggested.
Introduction
Me-di-ter-ra-ne-an - adjective; from the Latin mediterraneus, composed of medius (“middle”) and terra (“land”).
In its most literal connotation, the term “Mediterranean” describes something which is in-between lands. In the connotation in which everyone is acquainted with it, combined with its literal connotation, The Mediterranean is a sea acting as a border between very different patches of Earth: it connects the coasts of Spain on the West to those of Greece and Turkey on the East, it allows its sailors to reach the Atlantic Ocean through the strait of Gibraltar, it is the border between Europe and Africa.
At the Eve of 2020, thousands of years after the “Mediterranean” was first conceived, the semantic value of this word could not be more accurate. The so-called “migrant crisis”, taking place in the Mediterranean and precisely revolving around the movement from one land to another through this sea “in the middle of lands”, is an issue of primary political and media attention to the European Union, along with Brexit and Climate Change.
The country which is geographically closest to Africa and which is first-hand to be occupied and preoccupied with this topic is Italy.
Italy, as a whole unity, has only been a country since 1861; and barely some fifty years after being unified, it has been able to sustain such an ideology as fascism and to support racist messages, excluding non-Italians from its society and geography.
“Il piave mormoró: non passa lo straniero” - the river Piave whispered: “the stranger won’t pass through here”: this is one of the most famous Italian patriotic verses, part of a song written a month and a half before the end of World War I to honor the famous battle of
Caporetto, by the river Piave, in which the Italian troops (at the price of a conspicuous human loss) defeated the Austro-Hungarian troops (at the price of a human loss as conspicuous). The song has been used, re-used and adapted to fit various contexts and situations since then.
This motif and those lyrics are to be traced all the way back to 1918.
Exactly a hundred years later, in 2018, times have changed, especially in terms of technology and lifestyle, but the lyrics of the song dedicated to the Caporetto battle are still contemporary and describe some important recent political moves concerning immigration and refugees operated by the government in power in Italy from June 2018 until September 2019, formed by a coalition between populist party MoVimento 5 Stelle and nationalist party Lega.
The government collapsed way before its mandate had expired, as it is recurrent in Italian political history. In September 2019, a new government was formed. “New”, but as uncertain as the previous one. Throughout this entire period of what could be seen as political turmoil and stalemate at once, the “migrant crisis” has been on the checklist of Italian politics and has been restlessly tackled by the media, at times taking extremized shapes and in all cases following specific mediatic patterns.
In the following paragraphs, I will bring forward arguments to sustain the point that, when addressing this question, the most popular mediatic approach to it tends to be a
sensationalistic one. Data about immigration and immigrants’ backgrounds is rarely at the center of attention, while headings with dramatic connotations and (often) de-humanizing tones are put in the spotlight. Further, I will analyze the representation and perception of “the stranger’’ in the Italian mediatic panorama.
First, I will briefly contextualize the socio-political scenery which is being tackled in this research: I will give a short, essential overview of the current Italian historical and political situation and I will frame it within Italian history, suggesting that the current situation could be found to resemble, in some aspects, the period in which the fascism held power in the country from 1922 to 1943. Through this approach, I am aiming to both give the reader a spatial-temporal context in which to frame the country “Italy” as a living historical entity, and to bring forward an analysis to question whether when nationalist parties are in a
governmental position, a xenophobic political outline is more likely to be taken. This first introductory part will serve two purposes: first, it will allow the reader to situate the current topic of research and concern within a specific time and space; second, it will be useful in showing that the simultaneous occurrence of nationalism and xenophobia is not a brand new phenomenon in Italian history. Finding and describing a correlation between the two does not mean to necessarily imply that one causes the other, but it can be of aid in outlining a socio-historical pattern to disclose more about Italian mentality, local approach to policy in Italian national politics and more grounded, solid observations on the current situation.
Having established this background, I will move forward to the specific case-study which will be addressed in this paper - i.e. that of migration in Mediterranean waters, and the depiction of migrants by the Italian press.
Two comparative analyses will be brought forward - a quantitative and a qualitative one - to provide a full picture to be put within the frame introduced above.
This two-sided approach will be aimed at answering two interconnected questions, which together constitute the comprehensive research issue addressed in the paper. The first question will be analytical and will be aimed at showcasing in what way “the migrant” is
semantically and visually portrayed by the Italian press at the present time. The second and main question, descending from the results provided by the first one, will be the actual core inquiry to which an answer will be sought:
how is the mediatic portrayal of the migrant crisis affecting and shaping public opinion on the topic in Italy; and to what extent is this portrayal a trustworthy depiction of the factual reality of the subject?
The academic importance of this study, besides its timeliness, lays in the fact that there is a lack of publications on the topic which combine qualitative and quantitative elements to analyze this matter. The “migrant crisis” and its mediatic depiction are widely tackled within academia, but there is a gap between reporting on the subject and analyzing its consequences. This is the gap which this paper aims at filling. If the reader feels like they have earned more awareness (in terms of empirical knowledge) and more clarity (in terms of personal
positioning) after having read the upcoming paragraphs, then this research will have reached its main purpose, which is to show and question at the same time.
The sources and methods used will be both theoretical and empirical, working the findings out through a balanced blend of historical facts, official statistical data and academic
publications. The main theories on which the research will be based will be those of Umberto Eco’s “eternal fascism”, post-truth media theory, Slavoj Zizek’s idea of the “populist
temptation” and Neil Postman’s analysis of “public discourse in the age of show business”. All of these theories, along with the academic literature written specifically on the topic of immigration in Italy which I will refer to, will be effectively summarized and brought together in the upcoming section of the thesis.
As a general matter of fact, which may be seen as tragicomic, I would like the reader to notice that most of the academic literature which I have found and decided to refer to - and which is specifically about immigration in the Mediterranean - has been written by Italian researchers. However, their research has been published in foreign academic journals’ collections and has been divulged among international audiences. With this, I would like to point to the observation that the outer world appears to be more concerned about and more aware of the crisis going on in the Mediterranean than those who are directly affected by it, and who shall thus be directly in charge of taking care of it. After all, it is the Sea which surrounds ¾ of their country, and which they funnily enough used to name - and still refer to as - Mare Nostrum, i.e. “our sea”.
Structure and Theoretical Background
To give a structured outlook to the upcoming paragraphs, I opted for writing down a brief, essential table of contents to provide a bullet-point, visual overview of the paper. The content will develop as follows:
I. historical insights: a brief outline of some of the most notorious fascist racial policies and a comparison with Salvini’s recent “italians first” political rhetoric.
II. qualitative analysis: an overview of the prevailing verbal and visual characterizations of “migrants” in the most prominent Italian press outlets.
III. quantitative analysis: an analysis of statistical data retrieved from the official database of ISTAT (the National Statistical Institute).
IV. results and observations, discussing the results of the two analyses and merging them together to lead up to findings, considerations and to approach the final conclusions.
V. conclusion, wrapping up what will have been said thus far, specifically answering each of the above research questions and suggesting some further insights for new potential projects on the theme.
For the qualitative section, a scrutiny of the semantic choices taken by media to portray immigration will be carried out. Such recurrent concepts as those of “strangers”, “boats”, “refugees” and the potential reasons and consequences behind opting for such terms instead of others will be at the core of the qualitative analysis. This part will be mainly supported by academic papers dealing with the issue.
The data scrutinized in the quantitative section will cover specific topics, among which will be data on the channels through which Italians get their information; the television and radio information consumption per region, age, gender and education level; the newspaper and book information consumption per region, age, gender and education level; a statistical overview of the political activity per region in the year 2018; and an account of the data about immigrants and refugees in Italy.
Below, I will provide a brief summary of the publications I found to be most engaging and most complimentary to my own research, trying to split them into thematic nucleuses for a more sensible theoretical grasp.
1. Media and Politics
In her article in the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Monica Colombo [2] tackles the topic of “domopolitics”, i.e. of a political action plan focused on safeguarding a country’s internal interests without accommodating requests and needs that the outer world might have.
When supported by a certain mediatic intervention, she argues, domopolitics easily lead to a propaganda which promises to provide solutions not by suggesting concrete proposals, but by merely identifying problems. In the Italian case she analyzes, she individuates a mediatic shift which is influenced by and influences domopolitics and which she traces to have occurred between 2016 and 2017. this shift is best exemplified by some rhetorical alterations in the press’ definitions of the issue of (im)migration, which has gone from being framed as an “emergency” to a “crisis”. Colombo’s article is from 2017. At the present time, it is arguable that yet another shift in terminologies has occurred, and that the “crisis” has in turn become a phenomenon many times labelled as an “invasion” in a wide range of local press media.
Another article I found useful to frame my research in an actual geo-historical context was a publication by Mangone and Pece in the Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge [6]. In their article, the authors do not specifically address the Mediterranean migrant crisis, but their research works well as a basic foundation to further specific discussions, as it identifies a certain mediatic pattern in depicting the future of the “other”, which is often followed by a classification of the “other” as a “threat”. They also observe and academically sustain the fact that when mainstream media focus on a specific set of facts, they tend to tackle them from one specifically set angle which, in turn, shapes public opinion in a certain manner.
Mangone and Pece’s exemplifications are about the Belgrade immigrant march in 2017 and the Munich shopping center shooting in 2016, but a very similar press reporting scheme can be found when analyzing the migrant issue in Italy.
The above observation consequently leads a logically thinking reader to ask themselves whether there is, then, a difference among the perspectives taken by press-releasing agencies depending on their geographical locations and political stances. De Swert, Schacht and
Masini [11] carried out a comparative research on the way newspapers in five European countries (Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and the UK) portrayed the issue of illegal immigration at the present day, proving, through quantitative analysis, that different focuses were taken by different countries, as each linked its internal political instabilities to different aspects of immigration. Still, they concluded that there is something universal about the mediatic portrayal of immigration – and that is making use of the topic as a scapegoating mean.
To switch the focus from European reporting on European issues, I took into consideration an overseas perspective as well. Fiore and Lalongo [5], observing the studied phenomenon with a more detached eye, are able to frame the bigger picture which European academia
subconsciously tends to sometimes miss out on. Their research focuses on providing pure numbers, dates and facts, rather than analyzing verbal or visual interpretations of those. For the quantitative part of the research process, their contribution was a useful addition to the statistical data I mainly relied upon.
“Media often reports on refugees and forced migrants as a danger, a disease invading the home community; in fact, they are seen as a ‘tide’, a ‘flood’ ” [14] - this statement by Terence Wright is recurrent in more than one of the publications examined above. Even though his focus is on the UK’s immigration policies and perceptions, I found it to be easily translatable and applicable to the Italian panorama. This helps support the idea that a given mediatic pattern is persistent throughout European Countries through unwritten principles and that - as Wright claims for Brexit to have been influenced by a public opinion whose ideas were encouraged by a given mediatic portrayal of political issues - it is not completely insensible to claim for the polarized shift in Italian political elections to have been influenced by a persistent mediatic scapegoating of the incoming African migrants. To wrap up this section, I would like to mention an article by Musarò and Parmiggiani in the International
Review of Sociology [8], which discusses the visual sensationalist approach taken by Italian media on the depiction of migrants and addresses the contrasting policies which local governments and non-governmental institutions take on asylum seeking.
Concluding the assessment of the most relevant academic paperwork addressed so far, it is worth noting that the sources scrutinized are heterogeneous in form and come from multiple fields of academia (media studies, sociology, political theory, psychology) - nonetheless, they all revolve around the same content, which is immigration. This brings two observations with it, a general one and a specific one. The general one is that Media Studies are not a field per se and shall not be considered and studied as such, as the media world is a cause and an effect for the present we inhabit. The specific one is that in order for its mediatic approach to be understood and coherently commented, the topic of immigration shall be dissected in all the subjects which comprise its study within their field.
2. Media and Migration
Along with the academic papers which I have listed and shortly summarized above, I also opted for two books to refer to: Destination Italy, by Bond, Bonsaver and Faloppa [1], and In Mare Non Esistono Taxi (“There Are No Taxis In The Sea”) [11], by Saviano in
collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières.
As a large part of the research in the next sections of my thesis will be carried out through direct reference to selected chapters of both books, I will not summarize them in this section. Destination Italy is an anthology of selected pieces dealing with the representation of
migration towards the Mediterranean in contemporary media outlets; Saviano’s book is a practical written and visual report on the situation in the waters of the Mediterranean at this
very moment, scrupulously analytical of the situation and openly critical about the way Italian media and politics handle it.
3. Post-Truth and Related Theories
Specificity is key when a focus is established, and it is indeed fundamental to be able to support each and every claim one makes with existing and authoritative literature. However, in order for a specific focus to make sense, a foundational context is needed. Such a context, in the field of Media Studies, shall consist of authoritative accepted theories, both medium-specific and media-applicable, which shall serve as a solid theoretical base. The four core theories I found most sensible to fit with my topic and to be a foundation for it are the widely studied theories of post-truth and sensationalism and the lesser known theories of “eternal fascism” by Umberto Eco and of the “populist temptation” by Slavoj Zizek.
- “post-truth”
As Mangone and Pece state, “Information” is replaced by “post-truth” [7]. To best define what post-truth is in relation to the media universe, I will refer to a brief but illuminating article by Susana Salgado [10]. As she states at the beginning of her paper, directly quoting the Oxford Dictionaries, “post-truth relates to or denotes circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” [10, pag. 317]. Her analysis focuses on contemporary media and particularly on the online press. A key statement she makes is that there is a need to distinguish between “truth” and “accuracy” [10, pag. 319]. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to accurately report an untruth - this does not make it true; it only makes it trustworthy. Online media, she claims, have recently been
on factually describing it. In such terms, the post-truth mediatic shift has come along with a switch from modernity to post-modernity, i.e. from an “ontology of reality [to a] construction of reality” [10, pag 321].
In this stance, she takes a further step and introduces what she defines as “post-truth politics”, which she uses as a synonym to populism and which she claims to be “more a symptom of the current political status of the truth than its cause”. [10, 325]. In relation to that, the theory of the “populist temptation” by Slovenian scholar Slavoj Zizek [15] is worth considering.
- “the populist temptation”
Zizek’s idea is that the post-truth political form par excellence, i.e. populism, builds its way up on a foundation of scapegoating [15, pag. 555]. Populism, he claims, constantly refers to a rhetoric of “us vs them”, which is at once the problem and the solution propinated by populist propaganda. Consequently, there any concrete
political programme is lacking in the populist agenda and the way through which this agenda wins consensus is by identifying a common enemy to “the people”,
complaining about it with “the people” and giving promises to do something about it for “the people” [15, pag. 553] . However, the aforementioned populist agenda has no scheme or plan to concretize its promises. Specifically analyzing and discussing the European Union in 2006, at the time when he wrote this paper, Zizek goes on to ask three fundamental questions: where to? what for? and what then? [15, pag. 572]. The success of populism, according to Zizek, springs from a crisis within the so-called “left parties”, which protest actively but have no revolutionary ideas to justify their call for action. In such a political environment, “the people” become the one and only universal political subject. This allows for the easy construction of the “us vs them”
rhetoric mentioned above, which in turn creates a discriminatory public opinion towards those who are excluded from the mass by the mass itself. In Zizek’s words, for populism “the cause of the troubles is never the system as such but the intruder who corrupted it” [15, pag. 555]. Zizek goes on in his observations and concludes that “fascism is definitely a kind of populism” [15, pag. 556], as it builds its strength on the discrimination of a weaker common enemy to be persecuted. This point leads us smoothly to the third theory in which this paper is grounded - that of Eco’s “eternal fascism”.
- “eternal fascism”
In a namesake booklet he first published in 1997, the Italian scholar identified fourteen characteristics of what he defined an “Ur-Fascism”, i.e. a fascism which is potentially intrinsic to any political scheme, regardless of the label it gives itself. The factors he identifies which are most relevant to my project are points 5, 6, 7, 13. They can be recapped as follows: Ur-Fascism lays its foundation in the fear of diversity; Ur-Fascism appeals to the frustration of the middle class, projecting the cause of such frustration on the social entities which are not part of the middle class; Ur-fascism notices that the frustrated middle class is anonymous and it provides it with a social identity rooted in a nationalistic rhetoric [3, pag. 39-40]; Ur-Fascism is ultimately based on a “qualitative populism”, i.e. on focusing its propaganda on the majority of its electorate by addressing it not as a quantity of people, but as a qualitative whole which deserves to prevail upon its enemies, minor in number and with a lesser right to claim power [3, pag, 45-46]. Combining the theses of both theories, it is possible to somewhat logically explain how a coalition government between nationalist party Lega and populist party 5 Star Movement was possible in Italy for one year.
- “sensationalism”
Last but not least, the theoretical concept of sensationalism needs to be explained. The post-truth media environment, which was explained above and in which we, as
Western citizens, are immersed, feeds on a sensationalist approach towards news. Sensationalism, as the term itself suggests, implies reporting facts in an overly striking manner, focusing on appealing details rather than on the factual truth. To synthesize this concept and make it fit with all theories introduced so far, it can be said that we are in the historical time of post-modernity, are informed by post-truth, are provided with sensationalist ideas and are inclined to fall into the “populist temptation”.
To summarize all of this in a nutshell, as Neil Postman claims, “we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” [9, pag. 4].
The four theories introduced thus far shall not be taken as something per se. Although they are not specific about the topic of the immigrant crisis and most of them have been written decades before this political situation occurred, they shall be kept in mind as they constitute the skeleton of all hypotheses and conclusions which will be advanced. Without this skeleton, there would be a lack of theoretical background. And with a lack of theoretical background, it would not be possible to make academically valid claims.
With the knowledge summarized in this section, it is now possible to proceed to the application of the theories and observations just scrutinized to my specific research, which has not been carried out yet by other academics and which will hopefully not only fill a literature gap but be of practical use in some contexts.
Methods
As a logical follow-up to the so-far established background, the research will now be split into three equal parts: a historical, a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. In this section, the three analyses will be carried out. The next section will be focused on displaying and
commenting the results derived from them. To wrap up, the last section will consist of a comprehensive conclusion and some insights for further discussion. At the end, the reader shall have a clear and complete picture of the portrayal that Italian media give of the “immigrant crisis” and of this subject’s factual reality.
1. Historical Insights
Italian history can offer some insights from the past about media representations of “the other”, about falling in the “populist temptation” and about migration.
Umberto Eco individuated, as was seen above, fourteen foundational characteristics of what he described as “Ur-Fascism”. If such a concept as “Ur-Fascism” can be defined, it means that such a thing as “fascism” needs to exist or have existed in the first place. Fascism was in force in Italy in the period from 1922 to 1943, known in all Italian history books as il
ventennio fascista, i.e. “the fascist twenty years”.
A bit more than halfway through those twenty years, in 1938, the notorious “racial laws” were promulgated by the Italian Fascist government. Their essence was summarized in the “Manifesto of Race”, published on august 5th, 1938, on the fascist magazine The Defense of Race. This Manifesto comprised 10 bullet points [19], as were the 10 biblical
- “There exists such a thing as a “pure Italian race”. The pureness of the blood of the Italian race is the biggest sign of nobility of the Italian Nation above others.” [19]
- “It is necessary to make a marked distinction between the Mediterranean people of Europe (Westerners) on the one side and the Orientals and the Africans on the other side. All theories which call for an African origin of some European populations and consider Semitic and Hamitic populations to be part of the Mediterranean race are to be absolutely dismissed.” [19]
In the anti semitic historical context of the time, the racial laws were mainly meant to trigger the Jewish component of the population.
However, despite their focus and despite the fact that they have been written more than fifty years ago, the points they state can be overlapped with a rhetoric which made Lega’s
candidate Matteo Salvini be the most prominent persona in Italian politics and media in the past year and a half. The propaganda through which he gained wide consensus was built on two slogans: “prima gli Italiani” and “chiudiamo i porti” - “Italians first” and “let’s close the ports”. Those short sentences, as the ten foundational principles of the racial laws, encourage a xenophobic and nationalist approach to politics and society. Without sounding too far-fetched, by comparing the racial laws with the nationalist political schedule of Salvini’s Lega, it is possible to find worrying similarities between the two.
As anthropologist Paola Tabet has observed, “racism is like the engine of a car: it is something that is always there, inside society, and it stays silent until there is a moment of difficulty - when a crisis breaks out, it starts spinning crazily” [11, pag. 9].
Salvini’s anti-migrants propaganda is in this way similar to Mussolini’s anti-semitic propaganda. Both of those political figures have emerged in Italy, a country which is quite young as such and whose citizens, in order to identify as “italians”, recurrently happen to rely
on the persona of a leader who puts them (the Italians) in the spotlight; and who builds their nationality and their feeling of belonging to a same group by collectively opposing it to one of “strangers”. Thus appears the rhetoric of putting “italians first” and all of the intruders in the background. Through a common enemy, represented by a stranger, the “italian” can feel to be such on a national level. This is due to a dichotomy which the very concept of “italian” entails.
Being “Italian” - i.e., being of italian culture, does not have a geography, but involves anyone anywhere whose cultural roots are of that language and mentality. Being “Italian” as a citizen is, instead, a fairly new concept: nationalisms are likely to have a wide following in the young country “Italy” because they appear as bonding political mechanisms, which keep the country united as a whole by creating a bubble which excludes those who are not
“strangers” to it.
Keeping Eco’s and Tabet’s observations in mind, being acquainted with political and
mediatic rhetoric from the Italian past and present, it is apt to now focus on the main issue of this paper, namely the “migrant crisis”. Below, I will give a semantic, visual and statistical account of the issue.
2. Qualitative Analysis
After providing a historical context for non-Italians to grasp the mediatic and ideological past of the examined country, it is apt to move on to a qualitative analysis of the way Italian national media depict the “migrant crisis”, the current “hot topic” on the news-making and political checklist. In this part, I will report on and observe how the issue of the “migrant
crisis” is delivered, mostly through an analysis of its semantic depiction and some insights on its visual representation.
Already in 1995, a group of media researchers stated that “immigrants are present in crime news or in reports on political issues [...] while it is rarely talked about their cultural, ethnic or religious identity” [1, pag. 6]. Tackling immigration through the specific lenses of crime reporting and/or linking it directly to the reporting of political issues generates two effects: it only shows a narrow focus of the entire topic, which is much broader in form and content; and in neglecting other sides of the topic, it easily feeds a dramatizing representation of the issue. [1, pag. 7].
Moreover - as shall be seen below - the portrayal of immigrants as a whole, and not as individuals with a defined identity of their own, allows for a depersonalizing approach to them. As a popular street saying in Italy states: “one man - a tragedy; a hundred men - a number”.
Not in vain has former UNHCR chair-woman Laura Boldrini expressed herself saying that “it would be useful to frame migrants in a context of social evolution linked to contemporaneity” [1, pag. 8] - i.e., instead of framing them as intruders and executors of all morally
condemnable evil that could be done to a society, their arrival shall be considered as a matter of fact which shall be scrutinized rather than criticized.
Tito Boeri observed, already in 2010, that “the percentage of news including the word “immigration” has been growing by 15% over the last 5 years, more than in all other EU countries. The news percentage about criminal acts as a share of the whole of news about
immigrants is here three times more than in EU countries” [1, pag. 150]. This extract is itself from an article on immigration published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
In addition to the high percentage of news regarding immigration and to the selective and narrowing approach to representing immigrants which has been observed by several academics, there is a conspicuous part of subconscious mechanisms - i.e. subconscious stereotyping - which lead to a biased coverage of migration issues [1, pag. 149]. Gabriela Jacomella, a journalist formerly working in Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, subsequently Reuters fellow and now freelancer in Sub Saharan Africa, notes that
“sometimes what is outside of the picture can be more relevant than what has been brutally displayed in front of our eyes, [...] even more when we are dealing with a potentially emotional and involving topic such as migration, which by definition overlaps with - when not encompassing altogether - issues of ethnicity, social insecurity, intolerance and racism” [1, pag. 153].
In her article contained in the collection Destination Italy [1], Jacomella approaches the matter by analyzing headings in the five most prominent Italian newspapers in 2015, the year in which the “migrant crisis” is set to have commenced in the mediatic panorama [2]. The press she scrutinizes consists of newspapers La Repubblica, Il Manifesto, Il Corriere della Sera and Il Giornale. The political alignment of those newspapers is ideally portrayed as “neutral” (with Il Manifesto only defining itself as “left-winged”): this implies that none of them should potentially bolster racist or nationalist ideas. In support of their neutrality claim, it is observable that all of them have published oppositional content against nationalist and populist governments throughout the years. Nevertheless, Jacomella noticed that migrants were kept anonymous and identified merely by their country of provenance, which fits the same narrative already observed by Boeri’s research conducted in 1995. In other words, “the silence of migrants becomes the only accepted migration narrative” [1, pag. 163].
Has the situation at the present time improved, worsened or stayed the exact same?
Following up Jacomella’s approach, I took the four most read newspapers in Italy (La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale) and typed “migranti” (“migrants”) in each of their websites’ search bar. I copy-pasted all of their headings on a blank excel spreadsheet and ran the content through filtering and sorting commands, so I could visualize which were the most recurrent terms used by them. The time period to which I narrowed my focus was the second half of 2018. The most recurrent words I found were the following ones:
- for La Repubblica: traffico, emergenza, accordo, corpi (traffic, emergency, agreement, bodies)
- for Il Messaggero: soccorso, asilo, barcone, cadaveri (rescue, asylum, scow, corpses)
- for Il Corriere della Sera: morti, soccorsi, decreto (dead, rescued, decree)
- for Il Giornale: Europa, governo, emergenza, ONG, gommone (Europe, government, emergency, NGOs, dinghy)
In addition, every article which contained at least one of the aforementioned terms contained a number, which could be anything in the range which spans between 35 and 500 and which was either preceded or followed by the word “migranti” (“migrants”).
Not one single time was the name of a migrant mentioned: they were connotated by a number stating their amount or by an adjective defining their country of provenance. On the other hand, however, some names were recurrent in most articles of all newspapers. Those names were Salvini, Conte, Merkel, Rackete; and names of boats as well: Sea Watch, Open Arms, Ocean Viking.
The boats on which the migrants arrived were mentioned; those who campaigned themselves in favor of the migrants were mentioned; those who campaigned against the migrants were mentioned: everything that was European and immigration-related was mentioned. Still, not a single migrant was mentioned by name and surname.
I also went on Google Immagini (the Italian version of Google Images) and looked up “migranti” (“migrants”) on the advanced search tool. I set my commands in the advanced search bar so that the only images that would appear in the results page would be sourced out from Italian newspapers. I sorted them out both through the “most recent” and “most
relevant” sorting options. The results for both options were almost the exact same ones. The results I found through those search criteria can be essentially summarized in this screenshot:
This same content kept being iterated, regardless of how further one goes down in the results - the visual content linked to the theme is coherent to the verbal terminologies reccurent in newspapers. No pictures of single migrants are available, neither of rescue operations or of the migrants being on land. The context suggested by the visual material is mostly that of an anonymou and precarious overcrowded boat floating into unanymous waters, filled with anonymous bodies which are mainly shot from an upper angle. The viewer is not expected to reflect themselves in the representation, but rather to be a distant observer who simply
witnesses a phenomenon. The detachedness encouraged by the above individuated media semantic choices is further boosted by the impersonal visual materials which accompany them.
Now, I will move on to the quantitative part of this section and let this semantic and visual information sink in. In the following chapter of the thesis, Results and Observations, I will discuss the semantic meaning which each connotation takes most of the times and I will try to bring forward a sensible explanation to why it takes such a meaning, merging together this qualitative information with the quantitative one I am about to report.
3. Quantitative Analysis
As the year 2019 is not over yet and the National Statistical Institute's datasets about the current year are always published at the beginning of the next new year, the most recent datasets I could retrieve were those from 2018. Below, I will provide a description and short commentary of the data I downloaded (freely accessible for everyone from everywhere).
The statistics I have retrieved from ISTAT [18] comprise the following information:
- foreign citizens residing in Italy
Italy has a total population of 60.48 million inhabitants, out of which 5.2 million are foreign citizens. This number includes immigrants from within the EU, immigrants from non-EU countries, asylum seekers, people who have been in the Country for barely a year or for more than half of their lifetimes.
Even though political campaigns such as “prima gli Italiani” (“Italians first”) - advanced by Matteo Salvini’s Lega - have been feeding a xenophobic and nationalist public opinion, this dataset reveals that only 8% of the total population of Italy is of
foreign origin. This is a small amount compared to the amount of foreigners residing in other European countries with a similar population amount, e.g. Germany or the UK, where the foreign citizens are respectively 12.5% and 13.8% of the total
population. Moreover, the ISTAT data shows that the majority of foreign citizens who are residents in Italy does not come from the “feared” central-African countries, but from Eastern Europe and North Africa (over 1 million people come from Romania, 500.000 from Albania, 200.000 from Egypt and Morocco). The migration wave which lead those citizens to Italy dates back to the 1990s, when the Italian economy was more prosperous, and it had opportunities to offer and to be seized. In turn, this means that those immigrants have been residing in Italy for over twenty years, that their children are by now Italian citizens and that they are most likely well integrated into the Italian society.
- residency permits granted to non-EU citizens
The rhetoric of the threat of migrants invading the Country is further discouraged by the data on residency permits granted to non-EU citizens in the past year. Out of the aforementioned 5 million foreigners living in Italy at the present time, only 240.000 were newcomers who moved to the country in 2018. This is less than 5% of the total foreign population.
In addition, the data is about newcomers who are non-EU citizens, but this does not imply that they come from the countries portrayed as a threat by mediatic and political propaganda. In fact, residence permits were given to 23.000 Albanians, 20.000
Moroccans, 11.000 Chinese. Countries such as Senegal and Ghana feature approximately 5.000 people per country who have obtained an Italian residency permit in the past year. All of the information just stated could be easily attacked by
affirming that the “invaders” clearly do not hold a residency permit because they need to be granted political asylum before they can be allowed to apply for a residency permit. This is a fair point to make, but before jumping onto conclusion and falling into the “populist temptation”, let’s have a look at the data about asylum seeking and letting.
- interrelations between political asylum and residency permits
Out of the aforementioned 240.000 residency permits, 64.000 were granted for “asylum, asylum request and humanitarian reasons”. This is not an irrelevant number, as it makes for 26% of the total of residency permits given out by the Italian state. 11.000 residency permits following asylum requests were given out to Nigerian citizens, 7.500 to Pakistani and 7.000 to Bangladeshi citizens. This shows that the intake of refugees is not only limited to incomers from central-south African
countries, but it encompasses various geographical areas from which asylum seekers land in Italy.
Also to be kept in mind is that this is the number of asylum requests which have successfully turned into residency permits. Many of the refugees aggregated in camps are not even granted asylum, let alone residency. Moreover, the data shows that most of those who are registered as asylum seekers on Italian territory do not proceed further with applying for a residency permit, because they move to other EU countries; and what is the reason behind them being bound to Germany, or the Netherlands, or the U.K.? It is not the better food or climate of those places, but the much higher employment rate. One of the main points nationalist propaganda relies on is the discourse of “immigrants stealing our jobs”: what this propaganda does not mention and what the media often avoid broadcasting is, however, the fact that the
unemployment rate in Italy is currently 10.2 %, whereas it is barely around 3% in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK. What is also often skipped mentioning is that 285.000 Italians have left their Country in 2018, which is a bigger number than the non-Italians who have moved in the Country. Italian economy is slow-paced, and youth unemployment (18-35 year-olds) is at a rate 31.4%, which causes the phenomenon of the fuga dei cervelli (“brain leakage”), which in turn leads to the above observed phenomenon of Italian researchers’ work being published by foreign academia. It is then sensible to ask whether the issue of Italy is actually that of incoming refugees, or maybe that of qualified citizens looking for economic security in neighboring countries.
- channels through which Italian citizens get their information
When comparing the above data to the media representations which I analyzed in the second part of this section, it is also interesting to have a look at the actual mediatic channels through which Italian citizens get their information and, consequently, form their public opinion.
ISTAT data on information delivery and reception splits Italian citizenship in regions (north - center - south of the Country) and classifies information access according to age, gender, location and education level. Television is the predominant medium everywhere: 80% of citizens in northern Italy retrieve their daily information through television and 90% do so in the south. The 10% difference between north and south is compensated by radio listening: 20% of Italians residing in the south listen to the radio daily, and 30% do so in the north. On an overall average regardless of location, only 24% of Italian citizens aged under 24 read newspapers on a daily, while 50% of those aged 24-50 consume press releases quotidianly. This fact can be interpreted in
two ways. One way could be alarming, as this could show that political and news interest among youths is lower than among middle-aged people. The other way could simply be that instead of retrieving information from newspapers, the younger chunk of the population gets their news from social media. I believe that the most sensible interpretation lays somewhere in-between those two. At this point, the question of whether social media news is as reliable - (or more reliable or less reliable) than newspaper news can be raised.
- Political involvement
Last but not least, political involvement statistics are an interesting factor to consider when merging quantitative and qualitative analysis. According to the latest ISTAT data, only 4.6% of the total Italian population is politically active, where a “politically active” individual is defined by the Statistical Institute as one who “has taken part to at least one gathering, or debate, has volunteered for or signed up to a political party in the past one year”. Out of the small 4.6% of the total population, only 2.8% is active in the north of Italy, versus a 7.8% in the south.
Interpreting this data can lead to very different conclusions, none of which can be taken as fully correct, as all of them will inevitably withhold a splash of subjective positioning on the topic.
Results and Observations
Throughout time, there has been a semantic shift in the connotations used by the press to define migrants, as has been noted by Ju-Sung and Nerges [6] and Colombo [2], who
term “refugee” being replaced by the term “migrant” and the term “emergency” being replaced by the term “crisis”.
Each and every word comes with its own connotation.
“Refugee” denotes someone who “has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war persecution, or natural disaster” [20], while the term “migrant” defines someone “who moves from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions” [20].
An “emergency” is described as “a serious, unexpected and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action” [20], whereas a “crisis” is “a time of intense difficulty and danger” [20].
Therefore, shifting from reporting about a “refugee emergency” to reporting about a “migrant crisis” bears consequences with it which are not only limited to the verbal domain. Those semantic changes occurring in the majority of mediatic outlets contribute to a dramatizing portrayal of the phenomenon, focusing the writers’ and the readers’ attention on the overwhelming aspects of the issue rather than on its factuality. The sensationalism
constructed around the topic, which feeds a post-truth depiction of it, is further enhanced by the depersonalizing manner of addressing the “migrants” observed by Jacomella [1, pag. 155]. By collectively sticking to a rhetoric of “boats”, “shipwrecks” and “bodies” which I observed to still be the dominant one in the headings of the main Italian newspapers [part 2 of section 3], the press denies an individuality to the “migrants”. By not humanizing them and not focusing on their personal cases , only delivering their existence to the public as that of a whole body of “bodies”, the media puts the reader in the position of a detached
news-consumer, rather than that of an involved individual who could identify with other individuals sharing his/her humanity but subject to a different development of their lives.
Still, it would not be fair and comprehensive to just outline the dominant negative sides of the press’ take on what the press itself has labeled as the “migrant crisis”.
For instance, despite the sensationalist approach found in the analyzed newspapers, it is worth noting that the “Carta di Roma” training is compulsory in all Italian institutions which are authorized to train students into becoming licensed journalists. “Carta di Roma” is a UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) initiative which “has been founded in December 2011 with the goal of implementing the Journalist’s Code of Conduct on immigration, signed by the National Council of Journalists (CNOG) and the National Federation of the Italian Press (FNSI) in June 2008.” [16, “who we are”]. Sixteen Italian NGOs have adhered to it, and has the UNHCR and the IOM (International Organization for Migrations) as permanent invitees.
“Carta di Roma” is the most internationally influential statement towards a more well-rounded portrayal of the “migrant crisis”, but it is not the only one. In 1996, PBME was established as the “Public Broadcasting for a Multicultural Europe - a European initiative supported by BBC, together with BRTN (Belgium), NOS (Netherlands), STOA
(Netherlands) and University of Luton (UK)” [1, pag. 152]. Among its guidelines is to “avoid using terminology to describe minorities that can give offence to them and create negative associations of “otherness”. Avoid reinforcing stereotypes of minorities by unnecessarily emphasizing race or ethnicity. Avoid unfounded or thoughtless associations between minorities and social problems.” [1, pag. 153].
The means for a less post-truth portrayal of the topic have been advanced, but the general public opinion feeds on the general approach taken towards the crisis, which has been found to be sensationalistic.
In order to discourage this portrayal, not only shall a more “objective” siding be taken, as enforced by “Carta di Roma” and PBME, but also a broader outline of the phenomenon of migration at large shall be given importance. As Saviano notes in his book At Sea There Are No Taxis, Africans are not the only migrants. They are, indeed, “refugees”, i.e. political migrants, but Italians have been and are now, more than ever, economic migrants to
Countries within and outside the EU which are more economically stable [11, pag. 36-37]. As shown by the ISTAT data reported above, the number of Italian citizens leaving the Country in the past year is higher than the amount of non-Italian citizens coming in. While Italian emigration is defined all over as a “brain leakage” (fuga dei cervelli), foreign immigration is seen “not as a question to solve, but as the unsolvable problem which causes all others” [11, pag. 8]. On this note, Saviano ironically refers to “the most ancient rule of journalism”, which he states to be: “a piece of news is a piece of news only if it is negative” [11, pag. 10].
This sums up, in a non-academic but very efficient way, the core reasons behind the above scrutinized sensationalist approach taken by the press on the topic.
As the ISTAT data above showed, there are more Italians leaving Italy to not come back than non-Italians entering Italy to stay. Given those numerical outlets, it is sensible to ask oneself whether Italian immigrants to Countries in Northern Europe are scapegoated by the
destination countries’ governments in the same way in which African immigrants to Italy are scapegoated by nationalist political propaganda (Salvini’s popular sentences “Italians first” and “let’s close the ports”, for instance).
The answer, easily supportable both by quantitative and qualitative facts, is that Italians abroad are not treated, currently, as Africans in Italy.
Fiore underlines that “Italy has historically been a nation of emigrants, with one of the largest diasporas on record in the modern era, and an exodus of young people which has been
increasing annually” [5, pag. 482] and analyzes ISTAT data similarly to the way I analyzed it in the above paragraphs, pointing out that the reason behind the current “migrant crisis” being a “migrant crisis” in the media is “the convergence of amnesia and the manufacturing of historical and contemporary narratives. […]. Italians are somehow perceived as more entitled to relocate for work than the immigrants who move to Italy from all continents and contribute to the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the country.” [5, pag. 483]. As a consequence to those statements, she observes that, rather than a proper political crisis, what is present is a “crisis- and emergency-imbued rhetoric.” [5, pag. 483]
Fiore’s conclusions can be well integrated into some observations on policies in force in the European Union: there is a major difference, in fact, between the political advantages which a holder of Italian citizenship has in Europe and the (absence) of rights for someone who comes from outside of the EU. An EU citizen does not need to apply for a working visa if they stay within the boundaries of the EU; and they come as employable human capital, usually specialized in an academic field or in a profession. A “migrant” is in most cases a refugee, an asylum seeker, someone whose abilities are not recognized on the scale of European standards. Even if they have certifications proving their competences, those certifications are not recognized by the European Union and those competences are neglected.
Moreover, the way in which immigration is addressed in different Countries is influenced by each Country’s political asset and issues.
“International migration and asylum seeking are typical transnational structural questions tendentially faced by national governments from a narrow national perspective, often
distorted by (local) media representation and, today, mainly focused on internal electoral interests” [8, pag. 242] - As Musarò and Parmiggiani implicitly observe, “international migration” and “asylum seeking” are cast from the very beginning as two distinct
phenomena. As they state, the relevance of one over the other in national media does not spring from an objective prevalence of one over the other in a given country, but from the potential sensationalism linked to focusing news-reporting on one or the other, depending on politics and society.
In times of political uncertainty and/or economic crisis, as is the case of Italy at the present date, the portrayal which prevails is that of scapegoating the “stranger”, supporting a
“narrative of the foreigner (alien) who comes to take our best opportunities (invade) and only does bad to our society, breaking the morals he does not have because he is a savage
(criminal)” [1, pag. 37].
As ISTAT data has shown, however, this narrative does not coincide with factual reality. Nevertheless, the reasons behind it being a successful picture to feed media consumers have been disclosed.
As it often happens in Media Studies, phenomena encompass all disciplines which study a society and there is no such thing as an objective conclusion to a discussion. There is,
however, something closer to truth than post-truth; I hope I have managed to deliver at least a seed of it so far.
Conclusion and Discussion
made thus far in this paper, I will resort to making a list of the main questions and findings which have been advanced and which have emerged in the previous pages.
When stating the research question at the beginning of this paper, I split it into three core sub-questions:
1. How is “the migrant” semantically portrayed by the Italian press?
2. Why is such a semantic depiction chosen and pursued?
3. how is the mediatic portrayal of the migrant crisis affecting and shaping public opinion on the topic in Italy; and to what extent is this portrayal a trustworthy depiction of the factual reality of the subject?
After establishing a solid theoretical foundation (post-truth, eternal fascism, populism), a qualitative analysis of the semantic depiction of migrants and of the terms connotating them was carried out. The core answer to question one – supported by qualitative research of my own and authoritative academic articles – was that the depiction of “the migrant” tends to be sensationalistic, dramatizing, dehumanizing and highly influenced by the political
complications of the analyzed Country, which was, in this case, Italy.
Question two was answered by comparing the qualitative analysis obtained by answering question one with a quantitative analysis of statistical data about immigration and emigration, about the consumption of information and about political involvement in Italy in 2018. The comparison between the two originated findings and conclusions tackling Italian emigration, EU policies, economic and political questions and ethics.
By bringing together the answers to questions one and two, the two queries in question three were answered. The mediatic portrayal of the migrant crisis, if not constructively criticized, allows for the construction of a nationalist public opinion scapegoating the migrants for
political and economic fallacies in the system; and, compared to data from the National Statistical Institute in Italy, this portrayal does not correspond to reality under many aspects. The implications and reasons of scapegoating and the factual data on the subject of
immigration were discussed in the last section of the thesis, prior to this one.
Wrapping this up, I may now state that I have fulfilled the purpose I had set for myself at the beginning of this paper. I hope that the reader feels like they have earned more awareness and more clarity on the topic – and I hope I have managed to show and question at the same time, as was my initial goal.
I could easily stop typing right now; however, I would like to suggest some further insights which I think may be relevant to stimulate the curiosity of the dedicated reader who has reached this page and is still hopefully a bit focused.
To begin with, I find it noteworthy to refer to an encounter I had with a Gambian citizen resident in Milan, whom I had the opportunity to interview during the past month [17]. His name was Ali and he had left Gambia in 2013, when he was eighteen years old. Despite him not being able to afford education after fifth grade, despite his father’s illness and early death, despite having to work since he was a child to help out his family, Ali still looked at me straight in the eyes, laughed, and told me he is to be considered among the luckiest of migrants. “Gambia is a peaceful country” – he told me – “I moved out because I was seeking a better life, but Gambia is a peaceful country. We are not at war in Gambia. In most African states, people do not ‘move out’. They escape. […] They do not even have a country to refer to; and nobody ever asks them which country they are from. It is of first relevance to Europeans whether they go to Germany, to France, to the UK. But it is of no relevance to Europeans whether they are from Ethiopia, from Senegal, from Congo. It makes a difference
to be from one or the other, you know — mentalities are different, as they are different in each country here. For Europeans, Africans are a country.” [17]. The entire interview had started with a very simple question from my side. I had asked him how he felt about having left Gambia forever. What he told me was: “ No one has asked me how I feel. I mean, they have always asked if I felt cold, or ill, or if my belly was full — but no one has asked me how I feel. You know, nobody ever asks me about this [17]. Then his lunch break was over and he had to go back to fixing clothes. He was a skilled tailor, as he had learned how to sew from his father, who was a skilled tailor as well.
Ali, 24, a tailor in Milan, Italy.
A man who had nothing but his life, and who still looked at me straight in the eyes, laughed, and told me he is to be considered among the luckiest of migrants” [17].
What I derived from this interview led me to consider some transversal approaches to the topic of (im)migration. As Castels and Miller observe, migration has become – together with other major phenomena within the Western panorama – a global phenomenon [8. Pag. 242]. As they state, “the reason for the globalization of migration is systemic, being linked to developmental inequalities in demographic structures, gaps between rich and poor,
information about better opportunities elsewhere due to new information and communication technologies, mobility offers through trafficking, and the political crises that create refugees” [8, pag. 243].
I find this observation to be of particular value, both for its global outlook in a more and more localizing mediatic and political panorama; and for its detached insight on the topic, neither campaigning for nor against what it states, but simply putting it out there.
Deriving my last observation from the aforementioned remark by Castels and Miller, I would like to leave the readers with a statement to reflect upon, and to maybe further discuss in following research, which I am borrowing from Saviano [11, pag. 37] and broadening: if so many raw materials we use for industrial capitalism are imported by all European post-colonial countries, why do we refuse to welcome the people who come from the countries we import those materials from and which we have once colonized and subjected? [11, pag. 37].
Migrants from Africa are currently dehumanized in the media by being addressed as intruders and invaders, but those who were intruders and invaders in the first place were Europeans colonizing Africa in the 19th century to feed their Imperialist ambitions.
This last statement is a subjective one which I have derived from an analysis of objective sources. It is open to debate, and I think that debate and historical analysis are needed at a higher presence than the current one. To understand the present situation, historical analysis dating back to the history of colonization shall be carried out, in order to grasp the primary reasons behind the motives which lead African refugees towards the choice of migration to Europe.
I hope I will continue this research in the future, adding new insights to it; and I hope this paper will potentially feed discussions, debates and will serve as a starting point for further insights in media studies analysis and in academic fields crossing with it.
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