Oltre il rumore e l’inciviltà. Hate news e giornalismo televisivo in Italia

The study presents the results of an analysis of the main Italian television news reports on anti-Semitism from 2019 to 2021. The choice to focus on television and news reports, rather than other media and cultural information products, was made because television remains a primary source of information for the majority of the Italian population. During the recent pandemic emergency, it became evident that despite the sharp drop in advertising investment (Scaglioni 2022), there has been an increase in hatred, particularly anti-Semitic hatred, in the information ecology. This is linked to nationalist narratives or aimed at restoring traditional values, and it fuels an already highly polarised political debate in a now “dense” public sphere (Sorrentino 2008; 2015; Neville-Shepard, 2018; Sorice 2020; Monks 2022; Vox 2023). During the pandemic, TV journalists faced challenges reporting on cases of discrimination and COVID-19. These challenges were caused by inflexible media logics, an overloaded news agenda, the convergence of online and offline news processes and the hybrid nature of hate phenomena.