News- Values and Fiction- Values: News as Serial Device and Criteria of `Fictionworthiness' in Italian Television Fiction

Abstract

There has been a growing tendency over recent years for Italian television fiction to draw its stories from topical issues and news events. This tendency has been influenced, if not determined, by a wide range of interrelated factors: the `reality syndrome'; an increasing interest in news; growing intertextuality and intermediality in media discourses; the need for the `return of the already known'. Based on a long-term research project, this article provides considerable evidence of this phenomenon, and also examines some peculiar features and traditions in Italian cinematic and television production. The article also explores and suggests a working hypothesis relating to the possibility of identifying the equivalent of journalistic news-values: that is to say, a corpus of criteria of selection and relevance, which preside over the construction of fiction stories (they could be called `fiction-values'). The provisional collection of fiction-values, apparently now at work in Italian television fiction, seems to demonstrate further that, in the present climate of `news-vogue', the fiction-worthy tend to coincide and interweave with the newsworthy.