Abstract

Over the past decade, the increasing relevance of platforms within the hybrid media ecosystem has deeply influenced journalistic phenomena (and especially political journalism), forcing them to reshape their traditional agenda-setting function to achieve «newsworthiness» on the Web. Based on these premises, the article analyses the coverage of Conte-bis government crisis, aiming at understanding how mainstream media performed their agenda-setting function in the competitive scenario of platforms disintermediation. The research results show how news media, today, rarely set the agenda but still preserve a crucial role in the framing process. Doing so, however, they are forced to assume activist attitudes, standing out, as the case, as politicians’ «spokespersons» (political-partisan activism) or trustee counter-storytellers in respect to political-partisan narratives strongly unbelievable (political-institutional activism).