Immigration Emergencies: a Possible Praise to the Media

This essay discusses a critical view of the role played by the news-media in the shaping of the immigration issue. For this purpose, the context around the issue is reconstructed, especially referring to the concepts of post-welfare politics, uncertainty and risk. It is argued that an interdependence framework is needed to understand the media/politics relationship. Moreover, the impact of trigger events seems to be determinant for an effective methodological approach. Then, selected results of a survey on the immigration coverage by the two main Italian newspapers, in 2014 and 2017, are used to illustrate the complex of factors that act in modifying the issue, starting from some key events and trying to explain the reasons why emergency persists across time. Since 2014 it is possible to observe the increase of the management frame, through which newspapers – although in a contradictory way – highlight the weakness of the government action.