The attention to the recovery has made even more invisible those on the margins, whose stories, the marginal and marginalised people, present in 12.5% of television services in 2018 and that in 2021 are reset. This is according to the 4th Report Illuminating the outskirts – Feature Article Poverty. The report, promoted by COSPE, FNSI, USIGRAI, and AICS, in collaboration with Caritas Italiana, TGR, and Rai per il Sociale, states that stories that, in some cases, can only sensationalise pain, but that in other cases play a function of attention activation, have disappeared from the Italian news. This is reported by the Osservatorio di Pavia’s researchers, Paola Barretta and Antonio Nizzoli, who analysed the data of the prime-time news of the 7 television stations of Rai, Mediaset and La7 from January to September 2021.
The news related to the margins was 468 in total, increasing both compared to 2018 (408) and even more than in 2020 (234, exactly double the amount).
The main topic of this year, as of the other years analysed, is that of the policies to contrast poverty (66.7%), which returns to the levels of 2018 (60.0%) and is significantly higher than 2020 (39.7%). Within that, the most discussed topics are the income of citizenship and the blocking of dismissals.
The second item in the news, although half as much as last year, is the activity of volunteering (17.3%, compared to 33.8% in 2020 and 6.6% in 2018).
Poverty and the stories behind the numbers of a dramatically growing phenomenon, do not find adequate space even in infotainment broadcasts, investigated for the first time by the report. Indeed,the topic is mostly associated with immigration, especially in the Mediaset networks, while it concerns the condition of the geographical and human outskirts in Rai networks, although in percentages still reduced.
Finally, despite the fact that child poverty is increasing alarmingly, particularly among children and adolescents aged 7 to 13 and 14 to 17, news about educational poverty and school accounts for only 1.7% of total news. Just over 500 news in 9 months and almost all (8 out of 10) focused on organisational management linked to COVID.
In fact, 82% of the stories deal with the school from the standpoint of health management, and only 18% of those deal with other problems affecting the school system.