Presented at the ASMI Conference over the weekend. From the abstract:
In this paper I argue that the concept of pluralism – the most important value in
the Italian media debate – is conceptually confused. I identify three mutually incom-
patible conceptions of pluralism used when discussing the public broadcaster Rai: (1)
structural pluralism, satisfied when the public broadcaster is divided into autonomous
channels or programme groups; (2) summative pluralism, satisfied when output is di-
vided between political actors according to some ideal distribution; and (3) pluralism
‘lottizzato’, satisfied when a number of different political positions are ‘represented’ by
journalists within the broadcaster.