“Framing Lampedusa”. The landing issue in Italian media coverage of migrations, between alarmism and pietism

The contribution aims to investigate and deconstruct patterns of representation and news- media construction of the so-called “landing emergence”, as a very significant issue within the wider image of migratory phenomena in Italy. Indeed, while representing (from the statistical side) a very minority of the entrances of immigrants in Italy, arrivals by sea are emblematic and iconic of the more general coverage of migrations. Particular emphasis is directed to the dimension of “quantitative description” of landings – what can be named as a “media politics of numbers”, functional to the definition of an “alarm” frame – and to the politicization of the discourse on immigration. However, the representation of landings, in correspondence with events such as shipwrecks, becomes polarized with the addition of a dimension of pietism and commiseration. In particular, the focus is on the period between February 2011 (when greatly increase the arrivals on the Italian coast during the so-called “Arab Spring” and, then, the war in Libya) and October 2013 (when a tragic shipwreck causes 366 deaths in the sea facing Lampedusa). A further significant event for Italian media in this period was the visit of Pope Francis in Lampedusa. Through mass-media discourse analysis – mostly carried out with non-standard methods, referred to frame analysis and critical discourse analysis – can be identified and analysed the representative patterns of the “arrival issue” in mainstream media, the journalistic construction of the image of immigrants, the definition (also in terms of labelling) of migrations as a “social problem”, to justify the adoption of specific policies.