Abstract

Mediated deliberation represents an innovative research approach that analyses media in relation to their contribution to the public debate. The idea is that media can facilitate public discussion by providing coverage focusing on the specific contents of the issue, by emphasising pluralism and by offering argumentations. This article investigates press mediated deliberation presenting the results of a comparative research on Italy, France and Spain. The analysis was conducted on a database of 3,678 articles from 15 newspapers that were monitored for two months in 2012 and 2013. The results show the existence of a significant difference between these three countries. Despite our three case studies belong to the Mediterranean model of journalism, French newspapers seem to show a higher degree of deliberative quality when compared to the Italian and Spanish newspapers.