Italian politics and the ancestral village.
The presidential campaign here is reaching a climax. Polls in today's papers show the center-left coalition widening its advantage over the past two weeks, reversing what had been a slight recovery by Berlusconi and the center right. Remarkable about this is the slightness of the change, considering how dramatic the events have been. A week ago Berlusconi melted down on an interview show and walked out of the studio; a few days later he was clearly bested in his first face-to-face debate with Romano Prodi; and then Friday he cancelled a speaking appearance before Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers, and then appeared on Saturday and made a kind of spectacle of himself. After all this, the movement in the polls seems very slight.
But then, as in most campaigns, there are really two stories to tell. One is the slow and very stable knitting together of electoral chunks, and they change very little. Not that many people who've been watching Berlusconi for years will find his performance over the last week or so surprising, and commentators insist that it's part of a grand strategy to simply keep his face and name in the news. Individual voters make up and change their minds very slowly, and they are what the polls measure.
The second campaign is the mediated dramatization of the first campaign. Because it's mediated it needs to have a more rapid tempo, and the various news organizations manage to work with remarkable harmony to find the same events to dramatize each day. The center and left newspapers have remarkably similar front pages, as do the four free-circulation dailies that I pick up every morning here. The right press gives a different spin to these events, but they're the same events. It's similar in the US, of course, but the press there is much less diverse; you sort of expect a homogenized version of events. Here one might expect the different wings of the press to produce fundamentally different narratives of the campaign, but no--same narrative, different white hats.
It's tempting to say that the first campaign, the slow one, is the real campaign, and that the second one is just a spectacle. But in fact the second one, even if it doesn't do much to change vote tallies, does a lot to change policy formation. It's the second campaign that tells the elected officials what it is that the campaign was all about; it says what it was that voters meant when they voted. The second campaign has the capacity to falsify the first campaign. It has the ability to say that a majority voted for a war when really they voted for security, or that they voted for tax cuts when really they voted against gay sex. So it's very important. But it's not the same thing.
The Italian media are more important to politics than the US media. They aren't really more important to the first campaign, and I think many of the commentators on Italian politics misunderstand this. Berlusconi will get at least 45% of the vote because of the slow knitting together of an electoral base, not because he runs Mediaset. But the Italian media do more to represent the political system than the US media do. US politicians use advertising to carpet bomb the electorate; in Italy advertising is relatively unimportant. But talk shows on television are incredibly important in creating a sphere of individual actors with personalities and positions. They draw far larger audiences than their US parallels also, and they're better entertainment. And the newspaper discourse helps drive the telejournalism and the talk shows.
Last week we visited southern Italy, and I found myself in the birth home of my grandfather, who was dead long before I was born. This stolid old stone house in a street of old stone houses, all sharing walls, is still in the family. When we visited, there was fresh snow in the street. The house is heated by wood fires; one was lit in the second floor kitchen, and we sat around it and chatted for a little while, watching a fashion show on television. Yes, this is a stone house with wood for heat and satellite television. Not an unusual combination. Can I make it a metaphor for the current age of politics?
The presidential campaign here is reaching a climax. Polls in today's papers show the center-left coalition widening its advantage over the past two weeks, reversing what had been a slight recovery by Berlusconi and the center right. Remarkable about this is the slightness of the change, considering how dramatic the events have been. A week ago Berlusconi melted down on an interview show and walked out of the studio; a few days later he was clearly bested in his first face-to-face debate with Romano Prodi; and then Friday he cancelled a speaking appearance before Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers, and then appeared on Saturday and made a kind of spectacle of himself. After all this, the movement in the polls seems very slight.
But then, as in most campaigns, there are really two stories to tell. One is the slow and very stable knitting together of electoral chunks, and they change very little. Not that many people who've been watching Berlusconi for years will find his performance over the last week or so surprising, and commentators insist that it's part of a grand strategy to simply keep his face and name in the news. Individual voters make up and change their minds very slowly, and they are what the polls measure.
The second campaign is the mediated dramatization of the first campaign. Because it's mediated it needs to have a more rapid tempo, and the various news organizations manage to work with remarkable harmony to find the same events to dramatize each day. The center and left newspapers have remarkably similar front pages, as do the four free-circulation dailies that I pick up every morning here. The right press gives a different spin to these events, but they're the same events. It's similar in the US, of course, but the press there is much less diverse; you sort of expect a homogenized version of events. Here one might expect the different wings of the press to produce fundamentally different narratives of the campaign, but no--same narrative, different white hats.
It's tempting to say that the first campaign, the slow one, is the real campaign, and that the second one is just a spectacle. But in fact the second one, even if it doesn't do much to change vote tallies, does a lot to change policy formation. It's the second campaign that tells the elected officials what it is that the campaign was all about; it says what it was that voters meant when they voted. The second campaign has the capacity to falsify the first campaign. It has the ability to say that a majority voted for a war when really they voted for security, or that they voted for tax cuts when really they voted against gay sex. So it's very important. But it's not the same thing.
The Italian media are more important to politics than the US media. They aren't really more important to the first campaign, and I think many of the commentators on Italian politics misunderstand this. Berlusconi will get at least 45% of the vote because of the slow knitting together of an electoral base, not because he runs Mediaset. But the Italian media do more to represent the political system than the US media do. US politicians use advertising to carpet bomb the electorate; in Italy advertising is relatively unimportant. But talk shows on television are incredibly important in creating a sphere of individual actors with personalities and positions. They draw far larger audiences than their US parallels also, and they're better entertainment. And the newspaper discourse helps drive the telejournalism and the talk shows.
Last week we visited southern Italy, and I found myself in the birth home of my grandfather, who was dead long before I was born. This stolid old stone house in a street of old stone houses, all sharing walls, is still in the family. When we visited, there was fresh snow in the street. The house is heated by wood fires; one was lit in the second floor kitchen, and we sat around it and chatted for a little while, watching a fashion show on television. Yes, this is a stone house with wood for heat and satellite television. Not an unusual combination. Can I make it a metaphor for the current age of politics?
posted by jnerone at 1:50 PM
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