The Representations of Generalist TV: The Role of Talk Shows in Polarisation. Dynamics of the Mediatisation of Political Communication During the COVID-19 Emergency in Gender Issues. The Italian Case

The present proposal aims to analyse the dynamics of mediatisation of the political discourse that was inflamed around the CoVid-19 emergency within the main talk shows transmitted by italian generalist tV networks in the period from 24 February 2020 to 24 March 2020 which corresponds to the CoVid-19 pandemic’s first wave, offering a first quantitative and, subsequently, a qualitative overview of the italian case concerning the narration of the pandemic in the phases just before and after the first total lockdown, following a mixed methods approach. the final aim of the proposal is to bring out the dynamics of mediatisation of the political discourse around the pandemic alongside the role played by the media in proposing/imposing possible aspects of polarisation of the discourse, e.g. the role of experts and the role of politics, or gender issues, starting from the assumption that, in addition to their function of reporting facts, the media perform another one, that of “polltakers”, i.e. they provide indirect representations of the public’s response to the issues they themselves tend to provide