The politicization of entertainment media: A study of the Italian tabloid Chi during the 2013 electoral campaign

The concept of political parallelism identifies the different forms in which the media and politics can interact. However, media partisanship has always been almost exclusively limited to news media. This study shows that the Italian media system is at the center of a significant change, in regard to the way in which mass media political parallelism works and develops. Due to structural reasons, Italy’s political parallelism crosses the threshold of the news media and seems to fully apply to popular media as well. The politicization of popular media has been investigated through a content analysis of the Berlusconi-owned Chi (the most read magazine in Italy with 3.5 million readers on average). By proposing four models of coverage, the authors will show that the coverage strategies put in place by Chi convey the extent to which the covered subjects are politically and personally close to the undisputed leader, Berlusconi.