Polarization and Platformization of News in Italian Journalism

Abstract

Integration between digital platforms and news organizations has produced a substantial platformization of news. This phenomenon has been accompanied by a growing political polarization of journalistic content, exacerbated in Italy by the high level of partisanship that traditionally characterizes the national media. This chapter outlines one part of a wider study on the debate about the regularization of migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, based on mixed methods and a two-level analytical approach, considers articles and posts published on Facebook by 12 different news providers (top-down) along with users' comments on this content (bottom-up). The authors here present the investigation into the coverage of migrant worker regularization by discussing the findings of the evaluative assertion and news frame analyses carried out on the selected articles and posts. Using this multidimensional approach, the study highlights the persistent nature of polarization within a highly fragmented public sphere.