What I am about to put before you is a cahier de doléances on the situation of the Italian press, especially with regard to its relations with the world of politics. I can do this in the presence of representatives of the press, and not behind their backs, because I have been saying what I intend to say here since the early sixties, mostly in the pages of Italian newspapers and weeklies. This means that we are living in a country where a free and unbiased press is able to put itself on trial.
The function of the fourth estate is certainly that of keeping a check on and criticizing the other three traditional estates (together with economic power and that represented by political parties and the labor unions), but it can do this in a free country because its criticism has no repressive function. The mass media can influence the political life of the country only by creating opinion. But the traditional powers cannot control or criticize the media other than through the media itself; otherwise their intervention becomes a sanction—either executive or legislative or judiciary—which can happen only if the media commit crimes, or appear to lead to the formation of political and institutional imbalance (see the debate on the par conditio, or equal-access law). But since the media, and in our case the press, cannot be exempt from criticism, it is a condition of health for a democratic country that the press put itself on the stand.
Yet this alone is frequently not enough. Indeed, it can constitute a good excuse, or, more specifically, a case of what Marcuse called "repressive tolerance." Once it has demonstrated its self-flagellatory impartiality, the press no longer feels any interest in reforming itself. About twenty years ago I was asked to write a long article criticizing Espresso magazine, which was published by Espresso itself. This may be excessive modesty on my part, but if Espresso subsequently took a turn for the better, it was thanks not to my article but to the natural evolution of things. As far as I recall, my criticisms made no difference.
In drawing up this cahier de doléances of mine, I do not intend to criticize the press in its relations with the world of politics as if the world of politics were an innocent victim of the abuses of the press. I maintain that politics bears full joint responsibility for the situation that I shall try to outline here.
I am not one of those provincial types for whom things go wrong only at home. Nor will I fall victim to the error of the Italian press, whose love of things foreign is such that whenever mention is made of a non-Italian daily the name of the publication is almost always preceded by the adjective "authoritative," to the point that all foreign evening newspapers are thus described even when they are fourth-rate rags. Most of the evils that afflict the Italian press today are common in almost all countries. But I shall make negative reference to other countries only when this is strictly necessary, because "two wrongs never make a right." And I shall take examples from other countries when it seems to me that they have a positive lesson for us.
One last specification: the texts I shall refer to are La Repubblica, the Corriere della Sera, and Espresso, and this is out of a spirit of fair play. These are publications I have written for or still write for, so my criticisms cannot be deemed preconceived or inspired by ill will. But the problems I shall try to throw light on regard the Italian press as a whole.
In the sixties and seventies the polemic about the nature and function of the press hinged on these two themes: (1) the difference between news and commentary, and therefore the need for objectivity; (2) newspapers are instruments of power, run by political parties or economic groups, which use a deliberately cryptic language insofar as their real function is not to give news to the citizens but to send messages in code to another power group, passing over the heads of the readers. The language of politics was inspired by the same principles and the Italian expression "parallel convergences" has remained in the literature on mass media as a symbol of this language, which is barely comprehensible in the corridors of the Italian parliament but quite incomprehensible to the man in the street.
As we shall see, these two themes are largely obsolete. On the one hand there was an enormous polemic about objectivity, and many of us maintained that (apart from a bulletin giving rainfall statistics) there is no such thing as a really objective news item. Even if commentary and news are scrupulously separated, the very choice of the news item and its paging constitutes elements of implicit judgment. In recent decades so-called topicalization has been widely employed: the same page contains news items that are in some way connected. As an example of topicalization here is page [>] of La Repubblica of Sunday, 22 January 1955. Four articles: "Brescia—Woman Gives Birth and Lets Daughter Die"; "Rome—Four-Year-Old Left Alone at Home Found Playing on Windowsill, Father Winds Up in Prison"; "Rome—Even Women Who Do Not Wish to Keep Their Children Can Give Birth in a Hospital"; "Treviso—Divorced Mother Resigns as Mom." As you can see, the risk of abandoned children has been topicalized. The question we have to put ourselves is: Is this a problem typical of this period? Is there news of all the cases of this type? If it were only a matter of four cases, the matter would be statistically irrelevant; but topicalization raises the news to what classical judicial and deliberative rhetoric called an exemplum: a single case from which we take (or are surreptitiously invited to take) a rule. If four cases are dealt with, the newspaper leads us to think there are many more; if there were many more, the paper would not have told us. Topicalization does not merely provide four news items; it expresses a strong opinion on the situation of childhood, whatever the intentions of the editor who, perhaps in the small hours, made page [>] up that way because he or she did not know how to fill it. By this I am not saying that the technique of topicalization is mistaken or dangerous. All I am saying is that it shows us how opinions can be expressed in the giving of entirely objective news items.
As for the problem of cryptic language, I would say that the Italian press has abandoned this, because changes have also occurred in the language of politicians, who no longer read out obscure and elaborate phrases from a slip of paper into the microphones, but say apertis verbis that their colleague is a traitor to the group, while others brag vociferously about the erectile qualities of their reproductive organ.1 In fact the press has fallen back on a language within the grasp of that magmatic entity known today as "folks," but it maintains that people talk only in clichés. Here therefore (I am using snippets of data collected by my students, who spent a month checking the Italian press for clichés) is a list of clichés taken from a single article in the Corriere della Sera of 11 January 1995: "Hope springs eternal," "We are in a face-off situation," "Dini announces blood and tears," "The President's office prepares to do battle," "The stable door has been closed after the horses have bolted," "Panella shoots point-blank," "Time is of the essence and there is no room for bellyachers," "The government has a long way to go," "We would have lost our battle," and "We are in dire straits." In La Repubblica of 28 December 1994 we find that "We need to have our cake and eat it too," "Enough is enough," "May God protect me from my friends," "The Fininvest corporation takes the field once more," "The fat is in the fire," "There's just no help for it," "To cling like a leech," "The wind is changing," "Television takes the lion's share and leaves us the crumbs," "Let's get back on the right track," "The ratings have gone through the floor," "To lose the thread of the tale," "Keep an ear to the market," "Came out of it in bad shape," "The thorn in the side," "To render the honors of war"...It's not journalism, it's hackwork. All things considered, one wonders whether these clichés are more or less transparent than our "parallel convergences," the meaning of which the Red Brigades at least understood and acted upon accordingly.
Note that of these commonplaces, good for the "folks," half came from the writers of the articles and half from politicians' quotes. As you can see, to use another platitude, "the net is closing in," and we are focusing on a diabolical alliance in which we do not know who are the corrupt and who the corrupters.
We have reached the end, therefore, of the hoary debate on objectivity and cryptic language. New problems are appearing. What are they and how did they come into being?
In the sixties, newspapers were not as yet suffering from the competition of television. But Achille Campanile, during a conference on television held in Grossetto in September 1962, was struck by a brilliant intuition. At one time the papers were the first to give a piece of news, then other publications stepped in and took the story further; the newspaper was a telegram that finished with "Letter follows." By 1962, the telegraphic news item was given at eight in the evening by the television news. The next day's newspaper ran the same news item: it was a letter that ended with "Telegram follows, or rather, precedes."
Why was a comic genius like Campanile the only one to notice this paradoxical situation? Because at that time Italian television was limited to one or two channels considered to be under the control of the government, and therefore it was not considered (and largely was not) a reliable source. The newspapers had more to say, and it was said less vaguely. Comedians sprang from the cinema or the clubs, and they did not always make it onto television; political communication took place on the hustings, face to face, or through posters on walls. A study of televised political rallies, made in the sixties, established through an analysis of numerous party broadcasts that, in an attempt to tailor his proposals to the average television viewer, the representative of the Communist Party ended up saying things that were very similar to the remarks made by the representative of the Christian Democratic Party—that is, any differences were all but ironed out as each politician tried to appear as neutral and reassuring as possible. Therefore the polemics, the political struggle, took place elsewhere, and mostly in the newspapers.
Then came the quantitative (the number of channels grew more and more) and qualitative leap; even within the bosom of the national television network there were three separate channels, each with a different political orientation. Satire, the heated debate, and the scoop factory became the province of television, which even broke down the sex taboo, so that some programs broadcast at eleven in the evening were far bolder than the monastic covers of magazines like Espresso or Panorama, which stopped just north of the gluteus maximus. Still in the early sixties, I recall publishing a review of American talk shows, seen as the loci of civilized, witty conversation capable of keeping viewers glued to the screen until late at night, and I made an impassioned appeal that the format be adopted by Italian television. Thereafter, talk shows assumed a more and more triumphal presence on Italian TV screens, but not only did they encourage a decidedly forthright language (and, to tell the truth, a development of this kind occurred at least in part in the talk shows of other countries), they soon became the scene of violent clashes, occasionally even physical ones.
So television became the primary source of the diffusion of news, and this left the dailies with only two options. As for the first of these possible courses (which I define for now only as "broadened attention") I shall have more to say later, but I think it can be said that most of the daily papers took the second way: they took on the features of weeklies. Daily papers have become more and more like weeklies, devoting an enormous amount of space to variety, society, political gossip, and the world of entertainment in general. This has sparked a crisis for the quality weeklies (in Italy these were Panorama, Epoca, Europeo, and Espresso), which has left them with two alternatives: either to take on the characteristics of monthlies (but by now there are specialist monthlies—on yachting, watches, cookery, computers—with their own loyal and certain market) or to invade the field of gossip that previously belonged, and still does, to the middlebrow weeklies, Gente or Oggi for fans of royal weddings, or lowbrow products like Novella 2000, Stop, and Eva Express for devotees of the extramarital affairs of showbiz personalities and hunters of breasts bared in the intimacy of the bathroom.
But quality weeklies can descend to the low or middle bracket too, which they do in their closing pages—it is toward the end of the magazine that you find the boobs, the affectionate friendships, and the nuptials. However, by doing this they lose the physiognomy of their own readership; the closer a quality weekly gets to the middle or low bracket, the more it acquires a readership that is not its traditional one. It no longer knows whom it is addressing, and a crisis sets in; circulation goes up, but the magazine loses its identity. On the other hand, weeklies have been dealt a lethal blow by the weekly supplements issued by the dailies. There is only one solution for weeklies—to follow in the footsteps of those quality publications, like the New Yorker, which offer lists of shows, sophisticated cartoons, brief anthologies of poetry, and even lengthy pieces of up to fifty pages on the life of a doyen of American publishing like Helen Wolff. An alternative would be to follow Time or Newsweek, which accept being weeklies that talk about events already dealt with by the dailies and the television, but cover these events with concise summaries or in-depth dossiers written by teams of journalists, each of which requires months of planning and work, not to mention documentation so excruciatingly meticulous that these weeklies seldom have to publish letters of rebuttal regarding matters of fact. But even an article for the New Yorker is commissioned months beforehand, and then if it is judged unsuitable, the author is paid just the same (and paid very well) and the article is thrown away. This type of weekly has extremely high costs and can exist only for a global English-speaking market, not for a limited Italian-speaking market in which readership figures are still discouraging.
Consequently weeklies are obliged to pursue dailies, along the same road, and each one tries to outdo the other to win over the same readers. This explains why the glorious Europeo is closing, Epoca is trying desperately to find an alternative route by maintaining itself with television launches, while Espresso and Panorama are struggling to differentiate themselves. They are different, but the public is less and less aware of this. I frequently meet acquaintances, cultivated ones too, who compliment me on the fine weekly column I write for Panorama, and, they assure me with adulation, they buy Panorama and only Panorama in order to read my column—which, by the way, appears in Espresso and not in Panorama.
And the dailies? To look like weeklies they increase the number of pages, to increase them they battle for more advertisers, to accommodate more ads they make further increases in the number of pages and invent the supplements; to fill all those pages they have to find something to talk about, and to do that they must go beyond straight news items (which, moreover, have already been ceded to television), and so they take on more and more features typical of weeklies, transforming what is not news into news.
One example. Some months ago, on receiving a prize at Grinzane, I was introduced by my colleague and friend Gianni Vattimo. Those who have an interest in philosophy know that my standpoint is different from Vattimo's, and that nonetheless we respect each other. Others know that we have been close friends since our youth, and enjoy ribbing each other on every convivial occasion. That day Vattimo had opted to go the convivial route. He made an affectionate and witty introduction, and I responded in an equally playful fashion, emphasizing with witticisms and paradoxes our perennial differences of opinion. The following day an Italian newspaper devoted an entire page in its arts section to the clash at Grinzane that supposedly marked, according to the columnist, the birth of a new and dramatic rift in Italian philosophy. The author of the article knew perfectly well that this was not news, not even arts news. He had simply created a story that did not exist. I leave it to the reader to find equivalent examples in the political field. But the arts example is an interesting one: the newspaper had to construct a story because it had to fill too many pages devoted to the arts, variety, and society, pages dominated by the ideology of entertainment.
Now let's take a look at the Corriere (44 pages) and La Repubblica (54 pages) of Monday, 23 January 1995. As the pages of the Corriere are more closely written, the quantity of material is the same. Monday is a difficult day because there is no fresh political or economic news, and that leaves sports news at most. That day, we were in the middle of a government crisis in Italy, so our dailies could dedicate their lead articles to the duel between Lamberto Dini and Silvio Berlusconi. A massacre in Israel on "Auschwitz Day" made it possible to fill most of the front page, with the addition of the Andreotti affair and, for the Corriere, the death of Rose Kennedy. There was also some news from Chechnya. How to fill up the remaining pages? The two newspapers devoted, respectively, 7 and 4 pages to local news, 14 and 7 pages to sports, 2 and 3 pages to the arts, 2 and 5 pages to the economy, and from 8 to 9 pages to items on society, entertainment, and television. In both papers, out of 32 pages at least 15 were devoted to articles typical of weeklies.
Now let's take the New York Times of the same Monday. Out of 53 pages, 16 dealt with sports, 10 with metropolitan problems, and 10 with the economy. That left 17 pages. There was no crisis in progress in the States, and Washington did not require much space, so that the 5 pages of the "National Report" dealt with internal affairs. Then, after the massacre in Israel, I found at least ten articles on Peru, Haiti, Cuban refugees, Rwanda, Bosnia, Algeria, an international conference on poverty, Japan in the aftermath of the earthquake, and the case of Bishop Gaillot. There followed two pages of closely written commentary and political analyses.
The two Italian papers did not mention Peru, Haiti, Cuba, or Rwanda. And even if we admit that the first three interest Americans more than Europeans, in any case it is clear that there were stories concerning international current affairs that the Italian papers dropped in order to increase the sections devoted to entertainment and television. The New York Times devoted two pages to media business because it was Monday, but this was composed of reflections and economic analyses of the industry rather than of gossip about show business personalities.
By now the Italian press is a slave to television. It is TV that sets, as they say, the agenda of the press. There is no press in the world where television news ends up on the front page, unless Clinton or Mitterrand made a televised address the previous evening, or the CEO of a national network was fired.
And don't tell me that the pages have to be filled somehow. Take the New York Times of Sunday, 22 January. All in all there were 569 pages, including ads, the Book Review, the weekly variety section, travel, automobiles, etc. Let's take a look at the part where they talk about television—which is undoubtedly a domestic appliance that occupies a lot of space in the American collective imagination. Television is dealt with on page [>] of the arts and entertainment supplement, where there is a thoughtful piece on racial stereotypes in the programs, and a long review of a fine documentary on volcanoes. Then, obviously, there is the program guide, but the topic of television does not reappear even in the people-and-variety supplement. So it's not true that it is necessary to talk about television in order to fill pages and interest the public. It is a choice, not a necessity. On that same day the Italian press devoted a good deal of space to a program hosted by TV comic Piero Chiambretti (which had not yet been broadcast, and was therefore getting free publicity), in which the central news was that Chiambretti and his camera team had tried to get into the university lecture hall where I was holding a lesson, and I—out of respect for the place and its function—denied him permission to do so. If this was news (because it really would be news if some sanctuary were to remain televisually virgin), it was news worth no more than a couple of lines.
And what if some politician, TV cameras at the ready, had knocked on the door of that lecture hall, and I had requested him to desist? Without entering the hall, and without appearing on television, he would have ended up on the front pages of the papers. In Italy, politicians set the agenda of journalistic priorities by stating something on television (even by letting it be known that such a statement is to be made), and on the following day the press does not talk of events that actually occurred in the country, but rather of what was said about them or could have been said about them on television. Would that that were all, because there is no doubt that a provocative remark made by a politician on TV has by now taken the place of a formal press conference. The fact is, among political news items, Italian newspapers also give front-page space to a bout of face slapping between a gossip columnist and an art critic.
Italy is certainly the country in which, more than any other, the life of television is closely bound up with political life, otherwise there would be no debate about par condicio, and this was the case even in the days of Bernabei,2 before Fininvest3 appeared on the horizon. The press, therefore, has to account for this bond. A foreign friend drew my attention to the fact that, on Sunday, 29 January 1995, La Re-pubblica (front page and page [>]) and the Corriere (page [>]) both ran a story over several columns on Piero Chiambretti's historic announcement: "I'm not quitting" (and this only because TV journalist Michele Santoro had made a provocative statement about the matter the previous day). Certainly, the career decisions of a comic should not be front-page news, especially if the comic in question has decided not to quit his program. If news is man bites dog and not dog bites man, then this was a case of dog that apparently had not bitten anyone. However, we all know that behind that debate, which also involved Enzo Biagi,4 there lurked a feeling of unease, a polemic with a markedly political flavor. We ought to say that the press was obliged to put it on the front page, out of no fault of its own but as a result of the Italian situation. Yet I would suggest that the Italian situation is what it is partly because of the press.
Well before these events, the press, in order to attract the television public, had set up television as the preferred political space, thus publicizing its own natural competitor beyond all measure. Politicians put two and two together: they chose television and adopted its ways and its language, certain that only by so doing would they attract the attention of the press.
The press has politicized entertainment to an undue extent. So it was an obvious move for a politician to try to get himself noticed by taking the porn star Cicciolina into parliament; and the case of Cicciolina is a typical one because, out of instinctive prudery, television had not given the porn star the space that the press immediately gave her.
While it depends on TV for its agenda, the press has also decided to emulate TV style. The most typical way of giving any kind of news—political, literary, scientific—has become the interview. The interview is obligatory in TV, where you cannot talk about people without showing them, but it is an instrument that the press once used with great parsimony. Interviewing people means giving your space to them in order to let them say what they want. All we need do is think of what happens when an author publishes a book. Readers expect the press to provide a judgment and an orientation, and they trust the opinion of a well-known critic or the good name of the publication. But today a newspaper is considered a failure if it fails to run an interview with the author in question. What is an interview with the author? Inevitably, self-promotion. It is exceedingly rare for an author to say that he or she has written a disgraceful book. The norm is an implicit form of blackmail (and I would point out that this happens in other countries too): "If you don't grant the interview, we won't even run a review." But then the newspaper, content with the interview, frequently forgets the review. In any case the reader has been defrauded; publicity has taken precedence over or even replaced critical judgment, and often critics, when they finally write something, no longer discuss the book, but rather what the author had to say about it in the course of various interviews.
There is all the more reason for an interview with a politician to be an act of a certain importance: either it is sought by the politician, who wants to use the newspaper as a vehicle—and it is up to the newspaper to decide whether to grant this space or not—or it is sought by the newspaper, which wants to delve further into a certain position adopted by the politician. A significant interview has to take a lot of time, and the interviewee (as happens in virtually all the world) then has to see the quotes, in order to avoid misunderstandings or rebuttals. Today, the newspapers serve up about a dozen interviews a day in which interviewees say what they have already said to other newspapers; but in order to beat the competition, the interview for newspaper A has to be spicier than the one given to newspaper B. The game, therefore, is to wring from the politician a half admission that, artfully emphasized, will trigger a scandal.
So is the politician, on the scene again the following day to retract his statements of the day before, a victim of the press? Then we ought to say to him: "Why do you play along, instead of adopting the efficacious technique of no comment?" A few months ago it appeared that Umberto Bossi had chosen this path when he forbade his group in parliament to talk to journalists. A losing strategy, because it exposed him to attacks from the press? A winning strategy, because it won him at least two days of full-page articles in all the papers? Parliamentary journalists say that in most cases of statements followed by virulent rebuttals, it is the politician who has really made that half statement, precisely because the newspapers would publish it, providing them with an opportunity to deny it the following day, having in the meantime launched a ballon d'essai, and having successfully hit home with an insinuation or a threat. Upon which one feels like asking the parliamentary journalist, victim of the astute politician: "Why do you play along, why don't you demand that politicians check and endorse the quotes?"
The answer is simple. In this game each party has something to gain and nothing to lose. It is a game played at a dizzying pace, with statements following one another day after day. The result is that the reader loses count and forgets what has been said. By way of compensation the newspaper runs the story with a screaming headline, and the politician cashes in on the situation according to plan. It is a pactum sceleris at the expense of the reader and the citizen. But like all crime, in the end it doesn't pay: the price, both for the press and the politician, is unreliability and a "who cares?" reaction from the man on the street.
Interviews have been made more appetizing by the arrival, as we mentioned before, of a radical change in political language, which, by adopting the style of TV debates and TV donnybrooks, is no longer circumspect, but rather picturesque and immediate. For a long time we complained about Italian politicians and their habit of reading out frugal and obscure statements from a slip of paper, and how we admired those American politicians who seemed to speak off the cuff into the microphones, even managing to slip in a few witty quips. Well, in reality things were quite different. Most of them had taken courses in the various "speech centers" of American universities; they followed and still follow the rules of a public-speaking technique that is apparently improvised, but actually regulated with inch-perfect precision. Apart from gaffes, their remarks were and still are taken from special handbooks, or prepared at night by teams of ghostwriters.
Having shrugged off the ornate style of public speaking in the First Republic, the politicians of Italy's Second Republic really do improvise. They talk in a way that is often more comprehensible but frequently unrestrained. Needless to say, for the newspapers, especially if they need to adopt the style of a weekly, all this is manna from heaven. If I may be forgiven an irreverent comparison, this is a typical barroom psychological ploy: someone has one too many and says something incautious, and the entire company does its best to egg him on until he goes clear over the top. This is the dynamic of provocation typical of talk shows, and it also applies to relations between politicians and journalists. Half the phenomena that we now define as the "embitterment of the political struggle" spring from this uncontrollable dynamic. Of course, as I said before, in the dizzying succession of news items, readers forget the specific statement. What lingers on to affect social mores is the tone of the debate, the conviction that anything goes.
In this feverish hunt for statements, newspapers deal more and more often with what other newspapers are saying. It is more and more common to find an article in newspaper A announcing an interview due to appear the following day in newspaper B. It is more and more common to find letters of rebuttal sent in by people who say they have never given a statement to newspaper A, which is followed by replies from journalists who state they read the reply in an interview given to newspaper B, without bothering to consider the fact that B might have taken the item indirectly from newspaper C.
When it is not talking about television, the Italian press talks about itself; it has learned from television, which in the main talks about television. Instead of arousing worried indignation, this anomalous situation suits politicians, who find it useful when every statement they make to a single medium is amplified by the sounding board composed of all the media put together. In this way the mass media are transformed from a window on the world into a mirror, and viewers and readers survey a political world lost in contemplation of itself, like the queen in "Snow White."
Espresso has often launched epoch-making campaigns, the first of which is still renowned: "Corrupt capital, corrupt nation." But what was the technique behind these campaigns? At home I have only one complete year of issues of Espresso, 1965, and I leafed through them the other day. From issue number 1 to number 7 the articles ranged from politics to society, and there were no extraordinary revelations. But in number 7 there was a report by Jannuzzi, "Saint Peter's Withholding Tax," in which the Vatican was accused of having evaded, over a three-year period, tax payments amounting to 40 billion lire—with the agreement of the Italian government. At that time the Second Vatican Council was in progress, article 7 of the constitution was once more in question, and the topic was red-hot. Number 8 of the magazine ran nothing on the tax story. Instead there was an article on Hochhuth's The Deputy, the performance of which had been vetoed by police authorities in Rome, accompanied by an article by Eugenio Scalfari. There was also an unsigned piece containing inside information about the Vatican Council. Without the reader's becoming aware of it the first time around, the magazine went back to the topic of the Deputy in Sandro De Feo's theater column. Number 9 began with a long behind-the-scenes piece by Camilla Cederna on the Vatican Council, which was continued in number 13.
Only in number 13, two months later, did there appear an article by Livio Zanetti, in which he broached the political problem of the revision of the Concordat, and only at the end was the problem linked to that of the alleged Vatican tax scam. This topic returned in number 14, but without big front-page headlines. In number 15 the Church was featured with an article by Falconi on rebel priests and another on varieties of Catholic nonconformism. A front-page editorial assessing the political importance of socialist leader Pietro Nenni's visit to the Vatican did not appear until number 16. Would the Italian state be capable of making its rights respected? Number 18 witnessed the beginning of a new probe, on the mysteries of the law.
The magazine clearly had a strategy; it knew it could not cry wolf every week, so it used measured tones, doling the news out sparingly, allowing readers to form their own opinions gradually, letting the political classes feel the weight of discreet but constant monitoring, and making it clear that, if need be, it could take the lid off things once more.
Could a modern weekly behave the same way?
No:
1. In terms of its circulation and layout, the Espresso of those days catered to the ruling classes; today it has at least five times as many readers. It can no longer employ the technique of subtle, progressive, and gradual insinuation.
2. Today, the initial scoop would be picked up and amplified by the rest of the press and the other media, and in order to continue running the story, the weekly would have to raise its sights right away, and find more and more explosive news, even if this meant pumping up data that had not been adequately checked out.
3. In the world of politics, and when featured on TV, treatment of the topic would soon be on a par with a brawl. The subject of the news would no longer be the suspicion of tax fraud, or a problem with the Concordat, but the picturesque clash that would have been triggered by these problems—and the weekly would talk only of how other newspapers or television news programs were approaching the issue.
4. Finally, among the elements responsible for the transformation of the press, we cannot avoid considering the new attitude shown by the judiciary. The press used to intervene in places political forces kept silent about, and into which the judiciary could not see. After the "Clean Hands" scandal the judiciary was handing out so many indictments on all levels that the press was left with very little to reveal. All it could do was report (or anticipate, in a frenetic hunt for "leaks") the indictments that emerged from the courts, or turn the rules on their head and expose the judiciary, but even here all it could do was follow television's lead.
Whereas newspapers once had to send their spies into the corridors of power in Rome to wrangle cautious admissions out of people in the know, today if anything they have to guard against people who procure unsolicited, fat dossiers for them, whose contents, if not thoroughly checked out, are unwittingly amplified by the newspapers, which emerge as dupes and suffer a consequent loss of credibility. Newspapers now have to play a defensive game, parrying blows from outside.
Not that things go much differently elsewhere. In France, for example, there have recently been complaints that the struggle to get a scoop at all costs has violated the jealously guarded privacy of the president of the republic. The consequences of this race for scoops is revealed by a comparison between Nixon and Clinton.
Before the Washington Post's Watergate probe there had never been any attacks, other than political ones, on the presidency and its honorability. If we consider the extent of the deception itself, Nixon could easily have got around the problem by accusing overzealous associates. But he made the mistake of leading off with a lie. At that point the press campaign staked everything on the fact that the president of the United States had lied, and Nixon fell in the end not because he was indirectly guilty of a break-in, but because he was guilty of mendacity. The press's decision was therefore specific, accurate, and calibrated, and that was precisely why it was successful. What made the anti-Clinton campaign far more weak and disjointed is that these days we must have a scoop a day, and in order to have this no one hesitates to attribute to Bill and Hillary malfeasance of all kinds—from property speculation to using state funds to buy cat food. Overkill. Public opinion is disturbed by this, and remains basically skeptical. The final result, in the United States too, is an embitterment of the political struggle; a leader is replaced only if his opponents manage to have him jailed.
If it is to avoid these contradictions, the press is left with two solutions, both difficult, because even foreign newspapers that until now have opted for one or the other have had to change in some way, to adapt to changing times.
The first is the "Fijian way." In 1990 I found myself in the Fiji islands for almost a month, and last year I was in the Caribbean for about the same length of time. On the little islands where I stayed, all I could read was the local daily newspaper: eight or twelve pages, most of which was made up of ads for restaurants and items of local news. Yet I was in Fiji when the Gulf War broke out, and while I was in the Caribbean the first storm clouds were gathering over the Berlusconi administration in Italy. Well, I managed to stay abreast of all the essential facts. These extremely modest papers, working only with agency messages, managed to give in a few lines all the most important news of the previous day. At that distance I understood that what that newspaper did not talk about was not so important after all.
For a newspaper, following the Fijian way naturally means a dramatic fall in sales. The paper would become a bulletin for an elite like those people who read the stock-exchange news, because understanding the importance of a news item given in an essential fashion requires an educated eye. However, this would also be a calamity for political life, which would lose the critical function of the press. Superficial politicians might think that at this point television would suffice for their needs. But television, like every form of entertainment, burns things out. Political figures like Bella Abzug last longer than popular singers like Frankie Laine. A political class also grows and matures through the kind of wide-ranging, calm, and thoughtful dialogue that only relations with the press can permit. And the political class has everything to lose (with only a few short-term advantages—take the money and run) from a daily press turned weekly and modeled wholly on TV.
The other way would be what I call "broadened attention"—where the daily newspaper gives up trying to become a weekly variety magazine in favor of becoming an austere and reliable mine of news about everything that is happening in the world. It will not only cover the coup d'état that occurred the day before in some Third World country but also will have devoted continuous attention to events in that country, even those events that are still incubating. It will explain to readers why (for which economic, political, or even national interests) it is necessary to keep a watch on what is happening down there. But this kind of daily press requires a slow education of the reader; today, in Italy, a daily of this type would lose its readers before it managed to educate them. Even the New York Times, which has an educated readership and a singular position in New York, is now losing readers to the lighter and highly colorful USA Today.
But other things could happen. With developments in telematics and interactive TV, soon each one of us could set up and print at home, using a TV remote control, his own essential daily newspaper, choosing from a myriad of fonts. The dailies might die—but not the publishers of dailies, who would sell information at slashed prices. But a homemade paper could say only what users are interested in, and would cut them off from a flow of potentially stimulating information, judgments, and alerts; it would rob them of the chance to pick up, on leafing through the rest of a conventional newspaper, unexpected or undesired news. We would have an elite of extremely well-informed users, who know where and when to look for news, and a mass of information subproletarians, content with knowing that a calf with two heads has been born in their district, and ignoring the rest of the world. Which is what already happens with the American newspapers that are not published in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and Boston.
This too would be a calamity for politicians, obliged to fall back on television alone. We would have a regime like that of a plebiscitary republic, where the electors would react only in the emotion of the moment, program by program, hour by hour. This might strike some as an ideal situation: then, however, not the individual politician but the groups themselves, the movements, would enjoy careers as brief as those of fashion models.
True, this leaves the Internet of the future, and politicians like Al Gore have understood this for some time. Information is diffused through countless independent channels, the system is headless and uncontrollable, everyone discusses with everyone else, and does not merely react emotionally to the survey in real time, but chews over exhaustive messages discovered bit by bit, builds relationships, and enters into discussions over and above parliamentary dialectics or hoary journalistic polemics.
But, and at least for many years:
1. Telematic networks will remain instruments for a cultured and youthful elite—not for Catholic housewives, not for the victims of social discrimination catered to by the refounded Communist Party, not for the pensioners whose cause is championed by the Democratic Party of the Left, and not for the middle-class woman who demonstrates in support of the Freedom Alliance. In making this threat I am joking, but there is an element of truth here. For the time being, the telematic network gives power not to you politicians and your traditional electors, but rather to my students, who will establish privileged links with the yuppies of Wall Street.
2. There is no guarantee that these networks will remain headless, free of all control from above. We are already nearing gridlock, and tomorrow some Big Brother could gain control of the access channels, and then what price the debate on the par condicio?...
3. The immensity of the information these networks permit could lead to censorship by excess. The Sunday edition of the New York Times really does contain "all the news that's fit to print," yet it's not that different from the Pravda of Stalin's day, because—given that it is not possible to read the whole thing in seven days—it is as if the news it gives were censored. The excess of information leads either to casual criteria of decimation or to discriminating choices granted, once more, to a highly educated elite.
How to conclude? I believe that the press, in the traditional sense of dailies and weeklies made of paper, which one willingly buys at the newsstand, still has a fundamental function—not only for the civil progress of a country but also for our satisfaction and the pleasure of being accustomed, for some centuries now, to consider reading the daily papers, as Hegel suggested, the equivalent of morning prayers for modern man.
But the way things are going today, the Italian press betrays in its own columns a disquiet it is aware of but cannot banish. Since, as we have seen, the alternatives are difficult, what is required is a slow transformation, one that the world of politics cannot afford to remain extraneous to. For reasons we have seen, the daily press cannot be expected to eliminate altogether the process by which it adopts the features of weeklies. But we should not encourage it to report only gossip gathered in the centers of power, or rash off-the-cuff outpourings. For the risk of a collapse is common to all.
Just for a start, it often happens that a politician sends the newspapers an article that appears with the legend "So-and-so is writing in a personal capacity." Right, this is an aid to reflection, and an acceptance of responsibility for one's own statements. Let us ask politicians to read over every interview and endorse the quotes. They will appear less frequently in the papers, but when they do, they will be taken seriously. Newspapers too will benefit from this, because they will no longer be condemned to reporting only emotional outbursts drawn out over one drink and the next. And how will the Italian press fill these gaps? Perhaps by searching for other news, in the rest of the world that does not lie between the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate—places that billions of people could not care less about. Yet we must care about these billions of people. The press must say more about them, and not only because many of our fellow citizens are working with them directly. It is, after all, on their development and their crises that the future of our own society depends.
This is an invitation, addressed to both the press and the world of politics, to look more at the world and less in the mirror.