Based on focus groups with young people in England and Scotland and in-depth interviews with journalists, communication professionals and campaigners, this article examines how UK youths perceive climate change issues and how they receive climate messages from the news media and other communication forms. We found a strong sense of pessimism and disempowerment among our participants and identified a set of ‘triple-R reasons’ for their disengagement and inaction – namely the lack of relevance, resources and rituals. In that context, the media and other major communication forms have tended to hinder rather than help our young participants to be more actively involved and engaged – due mainly to the lack of positive and relevant messages and the focus on the extreme and the controversial.
This article provides an overview to a series of reforms undertaken at RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the Italian public service broadcasting company, since July 1993. The reform process began as a direct result of the collapse of the Christian Democrat party and its coalition partners after 45 years of continuous government and was initiated by the centre-left `Technocrat' government led by the former governor of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (April 1993 to May 1994); it was also continued by the centre-right Berlusconi government (May 1994 to December 1994), by the centre-left Dini government (January 1995 to April 1996) and the centre-left Prodi government (April 1996 to October 1998). The research focuses on the impact of the reform process on the functioning of public service broadcasting in Italy. It identifies four areas of RAI's operations which merit special attention: the system of political occupation, the so-called lottizzazione; the internal network system; the devolution of Raitre (RAI's third channel); and the RAI and Fininvest-Mediaset duopoly. The final section assesses the potential impact of the 1997 Broadcasting Act, which spells a further period of reform for RAI.
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