You were overly kind to the Economist piece, I think.  On the one hand, someone in the Establishment has finally deigned to notice l'Onda, on the other, what a pack of neoliberal silliness.  "Those crazy students, can't they see that the Berlusconi-Gelmini reforms are absolutely necessary?"  Gimme a break, Economist.  How about interviewing some of them?

By the way, this is quite similar to American discourse.  Even our wonderful new President has made his support of "merit pay" as opposed to tenure in education one of his issues.  Just this past week featured another in an interminable series of articles - this one in the New York Times - praising those administrators who buck teachers' unions and try to kill tenure.  Yet the counter-arguments of the teachers are never dealt with by tenure's opponents.  At least the Times today published three articulate letters by teachers who disagreed with them.

On the question of publicity, true, there is much that needs to be explained to foreign audiences, but if the students are, as you say, commendably seeking to avoid violence at all costs (learning a great lesson from my generation's mistakes), and violence is what gets publicity, then not reaching out means accepting no publicity until violence does occur, at which point it will be too late to do l'Onda any good.  But I'm not underestimating the difficulty of producing such analysis.  Hopefully someone is doing it.

But maybe, with the Economist noticing, others will notice as well, and a better grade of articles will start to appear.