The conflict in Gaza also rekindles attention on the war in Ukraine. According to Mediamonitor’s analysis of national radio and TV stations, the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also revived media interest in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
On the Italian media, one war leads to another: the conflict in Gaza has also ‘rekindled’ the interest of national radio and TV stations in the war between Ukraine and Russia, whose mentions in the two weeks preceding the attack against Israel (7 October) were 1,684, rising to 2,520 in the two weeks following (+49%). The figure emerges from the monitoring of the main Italian television and radio stations carried out by Mediamonitor, a platform that uses technology and solutions developed by Cedat85, a company that has been active for over 35 years in the provision of speech content. Mediamonitor.it collected mentions of the ongoing war in Eastern Europe and those related to the conflict that broke out in Palestine, analysing separately the two weeks preceding the terrorist attack on 7 October (23 – 6 October) and the two weeks following (7 – 25 October).
The driving effect of the conflict in Palestine is especially true for La7: from 23 September to 6 October on La7, the war in Ukraine was mentioned 68 times, from 7 to 25 October, the number of mentions rose to 161, recording an increase of 136% over the previous period. On the four channels of State TV (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3 and Rai News), the increase was 58%, from 319 to 506 mentions. Sky also ‘dusted off’ its interest in the Ukrainian conflict, with mentions rising from 184 to 247 (+34%). On the four Mediaset channels (Rete 4, Canale 5, Italia 1 and Tgcom24) this trend is more contained: +21% from 279 to 338 mentions.
Narrowing the focus on the individual channels in Rai, the two wars are especially ‘banked’ on Rai 2 (from 31 to 67, +116%), Rai 3 (from 86 to 141, +63%) and RaiNews 24 (from 154 to 248, +61%). Mentions of the Ukrainian war remain substantially stable on Rai 1 in the two monitoring periods (48 and 50). On the Mediaset front, the increases on Rete 4 (from 35 to 57, +62%) and Channel 5 (from 43 to 62, +44%) are more conspicuous. On Tgcom24 the situation is almost unchanged: 184 mentions between 23 September and 6 October and 210 between 7 and 25 October (+14%). The only channel that records a drop in attention for the war in Ukraine after the Hamas attack is Italia 1, where the relevant mentions drop from 17 to 9.
Mediamonitor’s analysis also focused on the level of interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alone, which restarted on 7 October. On national radio and TV, there were only 2 mentions of the situation in the Gaza Strip until 6 October, and these have risen to 2,780 in the last two weeks. In the narration of the Middle East conflict, public TV prevails over its main competitor Mediaset: 569 to 502. Looking at the individual television channels, we discover that it is mainly news-only channels that are talking about it: SkyTg24 with 303 mentions of the crisis in southern Palestine, second place for Tgcom 24 (285) which precedes Rai News (with 275 mentions). La7 is the first generalist channel in this special ranking with 139 mentions. Rai 2 and Italia 1 close the ranking with 70 and 36 mentions respectively in the last two weeks on the war in Gaza.