In Italy, national broadcasting and underworld media networks share a playbook, crafting political narratives and social identities, building neoliberal markets of visibility, and mobilizing the poor as populist political actors. Focusing on the social peripheries of Naples, this book examines how Camorra, one of Europe’s most entrenched and violently coercive criminal organizations, runs music, television, and online media empires that collide with state-regulated cultural industries. It reveals “systems” of cultural production where licit and illicit merge, entertainment becomes political, and power feeds on the public it claims to serve. In doing so, it challenges the mainstream understanding of the relationship between media, democracy, and violence in Italy and beyond.
