Media, Power and Public Opinion

Introduction

The essays collected in this volume are the result of a research process that lasted a couple of years, coordinated by the International Center on Democracy and Democratization of Luiss Guido Carli in Rome and funded by the Italian branch of Meta. The pursued objective was to focus on certain peculiarities of the relationship between media and politics. First and foremost, the reactions of political institutions and players towards new media and new forms of communication, and their strategies to combat and/or exploit the effects and potential of these new entities. In addition, these essays deal with popular and social reactions to the appearance of new media, by tackling the issue of both the curiosity and the fears they aroused. The methodological approach shared by the authors is that of historical research. Each chapter of the volume thus uses a specific event or a specific issue as a case study, favoring a vertical deepening of problematic nodes and concepts over their horizontal enlargement. Moreover, the chronological span of this volume – namely the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – guarantees a long-term and wide-ranging overview.

The choice of focusing on the two centuries following the revolutionary transition of the late eighteenth century arose from the conviction that this period brought about an epochal transformation in the nature and functioning of politics, at least in continental Europe. The rupture caused by the French Revolution, in fact, marks the point of no return towards an institutional model that recognizes the full public dimension of politics and, consequently, a new legitimate protagonism in public opinion. A political player, this latter, with outlines and a nature that are difficult to define, but not for this reason with a weak impact upon the dynamics of power. It is precisely this new protagonism, even preceding the ability of technological progress to multiply its widespread presence in daily life, that has provided the media with a central role in nineteenth and twentieth-century politics.

The elites of the Restoration are already well aware of the crucial role that the media play within this transformation. The case of the Italian moderate liberals analyzed by Domenico Maria Bruni is emblematic of just how evident in the early decades of the nineteenth century was the ←9 | 10→ability of the press to modify the space-time perception in the daily life of individual readers, as well as to alter the boundaries between private and public, and how clearly the focus was put on the consequences of all this in relation to the processes of political legitimation, the construction of consensus and the stability of institutions. Such themes constantly rise to the fore in different spatial and temporal contexts, as all the essays in this volume clearly demonstrate.

Precisely the theme of how the media redesign the perception of the boundary between public and private is a second crucial theme in the following pages. It is at the center of the reasoning proposed by Davide Bennato, who offers a clear historical and sociological development of how the evolution of mass media and personal media, on the one hand, and the development of social media, on the other, have transformed the nature and use of social space and indelibly changed the meaning of private and public. Whereas Bennato illustrates the latest consequences of this process, the previous essays help us to follow the traces of its preceding history. Bruni shows how the ability of the press, and journalism, in particular, to bring the public into the private and vice versa was well understood by the liberal milieu of the first half of the nineteenth century. Cucco explains how much of the resistance by the public authorities to the liberalization of the use of the telegraph resides both in reasons relating to the security of the state and in fears about the possible negative effects that the fast, broad and uncontrolled spreading of political and economic news could have on the life of individuals, for example on the fate of their finances. Federico Casari uses the actions ←10 | 11→of an important nineteenth-century Italian newspaper to illustrate how the desire to reduce the distance between politics and everyday life, and between public and private life, acted as a spring to reinvent journalistic communication in the Kingdom of Italy. In reconstructing the genealogy of accusations of conspiracy against the Jews, Ignazio Veca shows, on the one hand, how the use of narrative construction techniques and commercial gimmicks drive the success of a fake story among the public; on the other hand, how often the creation of fake news capable of producing significant public effects are created for entirely trivial personal motivations related to productivity and profits. The potential dangers associated with how a new media can affect private and family life and morals form the crux of an early 1950s US debate about the civic and social role of television, precisely reconstructed by Difryg Jones.

The centrality of the media means that they become essential tools in the political struggle both from the perspective of those who wish to conquer power and those who hold power. The transformation of politics thus poses new challenges for classic problems such as the creation of consensus and the legitimation of power. The appearance of new and increasingly pervasive media forces political and institutional players to constantly rethink the techniques and methods used for managing these problems. This is both in terms of exploitation and control, regardless of whether they be liberal-democratic contexts or dictatorial and/or totalitarian ones. These recurring themes can reveal themselves in different external forms, while exhibiting the same underlying nature in their essential features. This applies to the Italian liberals of the nineteenth century, who question how political journalism can act as an instrument of erosion of the fragile legitimacy of the new 1848 constitutional regimes (see Bruni’s essay) or how its language can be reinvented to support the ←11 | 12→post-Risorgimento political-institutional settlement phase (see Casari’s essay). It applies to the way in which various governments choose to regulate telegraphs (see Cucco’s essay). It also applies to the use that the Bolsheviks make of cinema as an instrument of political legitimacy and of a specific narrative of the 1917 revolution (see Pisu’s essay). It is valid for the radio as a propaganda tool and an instrument of war, both for liberal England and for fascist Italy (see the essay by Lo Biundo). And it holds in relation to the risks associated with the manipulation of information and the spread of fake news (see the essays by Posani Löwenstein and Veca).

Press, public opinion, constitutional transition.

The thinking of the Italian liberal moderates (1814–1850)

The thinking of early nineteenth-century European liberalism on the role of public opinion and the press in the transition processes from the Ancien Régime to the constitutional state¹ offers a particularly stimulating perspective for focusing on dynamics and problems regarding the relationship between media and politics, media and institutions, media and consensus building that are so typical of our contemporary world. For the liberals, the importance of public opinion and the press can be traced to the maturing process of the transition from a conception of politics and the exercise of power based on the monopoly of the sovereign and on the principle of the arcana imperii, to another, antithetical conception based on publicness as a pre-condition to enable citizens to control and limit power, as well as to participate in political life. This is an ideal type contrast and its conceptualization was partly the work of nineteenth-century liberalism². A detailed analysis of the events that unfolded in the age of the Revolutions naturally presents a much more articulated reality, a less linear development of the transition from one model to another. Nonetheless, it maintains its validity as it permits us to grasp the deep change clearly in action from the first decades of the nineteenth century onwards: the rules of the political game have profoundly changed in light of the presence of a new player, namely public opinion. It is precisely this change, however, that forced nineteenth-century European ←13 | 14→liberalism to set itself the task not only of constitutionalizing the public dimension of politics, but also of neutralizing the possible destabilizing effects that the new role assumed by public opinion in processes of power legitimation could cast upon the new institutions. In other words, the challenge was to transform liberalism from a force of opposition to the old institutional regime into a political culture of government capable of stabilizing the new constitutional regimes³. The classic example is that of the doctrinaires⁴.

Like the doctrinaires, the Italian liberal-moderates of the Risorgimento want to forge a libéralisme gouvernemental⁵. There is, however, one crucial difference. The institutional fragmentation of the Italian Peninsula and the control exercised over it by the Austrian Empire render this operation much more complicated. On the one hand, the political strength to impose constitutionalization in each of the Peninsula’s major states, or to form a single constitutional state, is required. On the other hand, the political and military strength to withstand the inevitable Austrian reaction to such a change is of critical importance. In short, the success of the Italian liberal-moderates depends on their ability both to modify the institutional order of the Peninsula, and to alter the international balance of power defined by the Congress of Vienna. Given this specific geopolitical situation, the ability to blend constitutional demands and nationalism together is crucial. This adds a peculiar element of interest to the Italian case since it also permits attention to be placed on the opportunities and dangers associated with the interaction between media and the mobilization of the urban masses.

These pages aim at offering a concise but articulated reconstruction of the main considerations made by the Italian moderate liberals on these topics. While not neglecting significant figures such as Gian Domenico ←14 | 15→Romagnosi and Giuseppe Pecchio, the focus will be on the party which grouped together during the 1840s, and which served as the decisive political force of the unification process. Particular attention will be paid to the 1848 rupture.