Medial and Political Agendas: Monitoring Issues, Assigning “Political Ownership"

The links between media and politics are well known given political agendas are more and more medial ones; for instance in Italy political debate has increasingly become mediatised since the first half of the 90s (Diamanti and Lello 2005). On the other hand, media analysis has always been a convenient tool for research on public representation of certain issues or for developing sounding analysis of public political discourse. Traditionally media analysis has been conducted with limited corpora of texts (i.e. newspapers articles), which may be constructed as samples or as “windows” on a specific news-story. More recently, media analysis can take advantage of improved techniques capacities of data collection, storage and automated content analysis, amplifying the opportunities to expand both depth and scope of such kind of analysis. As showed by contributions published on technoscientific public controversies (e.g. Neresini and Lorenzet 2014), longitudinal analysis on medial representations can be done with good results validated by external sources. Therefore this approach may be useful in order to explore even more in depth the relationships between media and politics, both in general terms and regarding specific issues. This is the case of our contribution: mixing time-series and more recent data (last five-year period) trends of public issues will be examined on the top Italian daily-newspapers. The coverage of specific issues will be mapped across time and their endorsement will be analysed looking for the shifts in “political ownership” of specific themes; the analysis will consider general trend in the last 25 years and a specific focus on the most recent Italian political campaigns for elections. The aim is to show how the political agenda is constructed and represented in the media arena.