Embryos in the Italian Newspapers

In Italy, the popular referendum on assisted reproduction (12nd-13rd June 2005) marked the end of the primacy of the parliamentary dimension in the embryo debate that characterized most of the rest of Europe. Decisions about the status of the embryo and the limits of stem cell research were then made public and the Italian mass-media became a privileged arena of public debate on the embryo issue by being both source of information and persuasion. This makes Italian mass-media a particularly interesting object of study for whom would like to understand the relationship between embryo-research bioethics and the media. Especially if we take into account that public communication on those scientific issues can arguably play an important role in easily eliciting the idea that a new life has to be preserved from the formation of a new genome thereby favoring this bioethical position over other ones more compatible with embryonic stem cell research. After sketching out the context in which the popular referendum was done, this work presents the results of a first quantitative analysis on 98 selected articles that appeared in the major Italian newspapers before and during the popular referendum. It is shown among other things that: 1) arguments (similar to those already underpinned during the previous parliamentary debate) in favor of preserving embryo from the formation of a new genome are prevalent; 2) if embryo is the focus of the article, then scientific research claims are largely ignored.