Media Representations of Migrants in Italy: Traditional Biases and Positive Changes to Remove “Boundaries

Abstract

The paper focuses on the strategies used by Italian news media to report migration. The coverage is connected to the peculiarities of this information system and to the recent radical political transformations. A reconstruction of the different phases and meaning given by Italian journalism to migrants in the last three decades is presented, underlining both the permanence of some old biases, like criminalisation or dramatisation, and the emergence of new trends.