A Short Honeymoon. The Italian Press and the Coverage of the Government’s Strategic Communication on COVID-19

Emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic are key drivers of strategic communication. Governments must implement communication strategies for ensuring the well-being of citizens, to enforce social control policies responding to a health emergency. Choosing Italy as case study, this analysis focuses on the press coverage of the government’s strategic communication of such policies, during two different pandemic waves in 2020, evaluating if the press supported or hindered it. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified which criteria of newsworthiness have influenced news media coverage. In other words, our focus will not be strategic communication per se, but on agenda setting. By understanding the COVID-19-related agenda of newspaper discussions, we will be able to assess whether and how “news values” have influenced the media coverage of the government’s strategic communication, and how this has influenced the perception of citizens. Our results offer a contrasting picture: during the first wave, a sort of “honeymoon” between the institutions and the press emerges. During the second wave instead, the journalistic routines of the Italian media system- partisanship and conflictual narrations- influenced the narration of the pandemic, undermining the effectiveness of the strategic communication of Covid-19 social control policies.