Italy is sweltering in abnormally high temperatures, but its media appear to be more interested in how the extreme heat is being reported in the foreign press than delving deeply into the effects in a country deemed to be among the most vulnerable in Europe to the climate crisis.
Over the weekend, several outlets picked up on reports on Italy’s heatwave in leading foreign news websites – including the Guardian, the Times and the BBC. They were particularly fascinated by a headline in the Times calling Rome – where temperatures are forecast to reach highs of 43C on Tuesday – the “Infernal City”, a play on the nickname “Eternal City”. So much so that it was still a talking point come Monday.
While there was coverage in Monday’s newspapers of the anticyclone that could push temperatures close to the European record of 48.8C in parts of Sardinia, Puglia and Sicily, most front pages led with the bufera, or storm, caused by the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, calling for an amnesty for tax evaders.
That the climate crisis is not well covered by the Italian media is unsurprising, said Gianni Riotta, the director of the school of journalism at Rome’s Luiss University. “It is lousy and it has been lousy for years,” he said.
Much of this is due to the dominance of the rightwing media, which for decades have been owned or heavily influenced by the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Still today, rightwing newspapers such as Il Giornale, Libero and La Verità serve as mouthpieces for Giorgia Meloni’s government, whose strategy on tackling the climate crisis is vague.
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, has long been ridiculed by factions of the rightwing press. “Don’t forget that it was the Italian rightwing press which invented the word ‘Gretina’ in reference to Thunberg,” Riotta said. “Of course, for Italian ears this sounds like cretina (cretin).”
Riotta, a former deputy editor of the more centrist newspaper Corriere della Sera, recalled Giuliano Ferrara, a former right-hand man of Berlusconi, who he said was a climate change denier and mounted a strong campaign against climate scientists.
“Whenever we did work on the climate crisis, we would be blasted by people saying ‘this is too much’,” Riotta said.
Stefano Caserini, a climate change professor at Milan polytechnic, said: “There are newspapers on the rightwing side which, if not openly denying the climate crisis, are inactivists. Over the next few years we will experience even more heatwaves, and currently the debate here is not really happening.”
A study published last year by ECCO, a climate change thinktank, found that while the majority of Italians were fully aware of the impact of climate change and were ready to take collective action, there was a strong sense of mistrust towards politicians, institutions and the media, as well as a feeling of a lack of representation across the political spectrum on climate issues.
Carlo Cacciamani, the chief of Italy’s national meteorological and climatology agency, said last week’s anticyclone was well covered by newspapers such La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera but media coverage generally lacked in-depth insight.
“It’s not that the heat isn’t being discussed, what’s missing is the depth,” he said. “There needs to be more explanation on why this is happening and what is causing it.”
Cacciamani said part of the problem was that the climate crisis theme “gets forgotten about” beyond the emergency of an extreme weather event. “During normal periods the theme needs to be prioritised – we need the media more than ever, and the process involves much more than just giving ‘shock’ news at the time of an event,” he said.
