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Plato, in different dialogues such as Statesman, Protagoras, Republic, Timaeus-Critias and Laws, creates a number of myths that describe both the early condition of the human race and the efforts made by men to develop the first forms of social and political organisation. Myth - that ancient and unsurpassed mean of transmission of knowledge and moral precepts - seems indeed to be the only instrument able to reconstruct not only the anthropological characteristics and original state of man, but also the genesis of human aggregation and of the first technical and cultural realisations. Therefore, a determined group of dialogical characters – The Stranger of Elea, Protagoras, Socrates, Critias and the Athenian –, within the different platonic dialogues, presents a number of myths marked not only by their great literary fascination, but also by their independent philosophical value. Although each myth is linked to the others by many analogies both in structure and content, each one is an autonomous artistic and intellectual creation, but is however intrinsically bound to the dialogical context it is collocated in. As myths are introduced in order to give answers to precise questions and find solutions to certain problems (is the "golden age" lifestyle a desirable one? is it just an "animal paradise"? is man a selfish and aggressive being or is he a social and peace-loving one? is the political aggregation the product of an artificial and utilitarian contract or is it a natural result? is it possible to create a polis that guarantees collaboration and peace, without excluding cultural and aesthetical realisations?), it is essential not to sever the deep link between the mythical tale and the context in which it is collocated, but rather to examine carefully the function and meaning of the former in relationship to the latter and vice versa.

Modern politicians need to diversify their communication strategies to reach a wide range of citizens/electors. Communication of political programmes must be associated with the effective communication of the private sphere. However, does this rule apply to a scenario in which the political stage is not ruled by politicians? By presenting the results of a content analysis of four Italian tabloids and by relying on an interview with the communication officer of Italian former premier, this study shows how political popularization develops in the era of the technocrat. The authors claim that the search for 'mediated intimacy' with the citizens/electors does not exclusively represent a concern for professional politicians. The need to personify political action is not only dependent on the necessity to maximize the electoral turnout, but it also depends on the acknowledgement of the fact that any public officer cannot avoid opening the doors of his or her own private sphere.

The article focuses on the phenomenon of political fandom and its potential impact on citizens' political engagement. In particular, our research intends to offer a contribution to the discussion of possible types of online fan-like attachment to a political leader. Our case study is the Instagram account @lebimbedigiuseppeconte, a fanpage celebrating the former Italian Prime minister Giuseppe Conte. We analyzed posts between 2018 and 2022 with the aim of investigating the evolution of the account following the change of Conte's role from the office of Prime Minister—that he held as an outsider—to the more politicized role of leader of the Five-Star Movement. Our results suggest that, although in the first phase @lebimbedigiuseppeconte could not be regarded as a standard type of political fandom, its evolution shows that also a fanpage born with no apparent political goal and a vocation for entertaining may become a platform for the diffusion of political contents.

The article provides evidences about mechanisms and practices that undermine the effectiveness of investigative journalism through the analysis of selected case studies of corruptive phenomena in Italy, Hungary, Romania and Latvia. In particular, the article shows that the idea of watchdog journalism does not work actually in the observed countries. Indeed, investigative journalism requires certain socio-economic conditions, such as a low degree of influence of the political and economic spheres and a high level of journalistic professionalism, which are not (always) present in the aforementioned countries. More specifically, the article focuses on three aspects that may distort investigative journalists' work: a certain proximity (sometimes overlapping) of publishers (often rich oligarchs or prominent businessmen) and politicians, the 'blackmail' exercised through advertising investments and the interferences of secret services, which may dissuade newsrooms from performing their role as the watchdog.

As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 articles) from the period 2004 to 2013 were analyzed using dedicated software. We demonstrate that freedom of press is not the only dimension that affects the ability to and the way in which news media report on corruption. Because of its political partisanship, the Italian press tends to emphasize and dramatize corruption cases involving domestic public administrators and, in particular, politicians. The British coverage is affected mainly by market factors, and the press pays more attention to cases occurring abroad and in sport. The French coverage shares specific features with both the British and the Italian coverage: Newspapers mainly focus on corruption involving business companies and foreign actors, but they also cover cases involving domestic politicians. Media market segmentation, political parallelism, and media instrumentalization determine different representations preventing the establishment of unanimously shared indignation.

Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique "micro-cultures." Exploring this "particularist" approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.