L’Ultima Generazione o ecoteppisti? L’attivismo sulla crisi climatica tra media agenda, notiziabilit? e demonizzazione

This article investigates how the Italian national press portrayed climate protests organised by Ultima Generazione (Last Generation), Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future between 2019 and 2023. Adopting an event-centered research design, we reconstructed every major action by the three movements and collected two corpus of n=1045 and 258 newspaper items drawn from Italy’s highest-circulation dailies. Each item was qualitatively analysed for typographical salience, rhetorical devices and frames of legitimation or delegitimation. Results confirm a visibility paradox. Only spectacular, disruptive tactics, such as throwing soup on a Van Gogh or dousing the Italian Senate in paint, secured newspaper exposure, yet they simultaneously triggered a wave of labelling that cast activists as «eco-vandals» or «fanatics», especially in right-leaning outlets. Moreover, findings illustrate that news coverage largely marginalised non-confrontational demonstrations, leaving Fridays for Future mostly invisible. What we found confirms what already theorised by Gamson and Wolfsfeld (1993): movements must maximize newsworthiness, but in doing so they risk forfeiting message control. We discuss the strategic implications for contemporary climate activism and for democratic deliberation on the ecological crisis.