To seal the year 1984, which, out of mental laziness and a hunger for portents, we have been quick to call the Orwell year, I would like to place before this Almanac praise for the reporter, its collective and almost always unknown author. The reporter is the foot soldier of the paper, even if today he is rarely forced to walk. He is in the front line, oppressed by urgency, by the fear of missing a date with the deed or the misdeed.
He is denied the charitable (and egoistic) screen of ignorance: he has to stick his nose into the most cruel and sordid reality, which we ordinary folk repress. Furthermore, he has to track down, describe, and transcribe, within a few minutes, events that challenge the experience of the specialist, sociologist, criminologist, doctor, engineer, technician. The reader not only expects the pure “photograph” of the event but also wants the background, the setting, the why. How can it surprise us if he sometimes fails?
Let’s watch him in his daily activity, which is often a battle. He has to pick up signals on the fly, sniff them in the air, distinguish true trails from false. Hurry to the spot, vying with his colleagues from other papers; usually they are his friends, but at that moment they are competitors and rivals.
Cut through the crowd, bluntly interrogate witnesses or even victims of an accident, who have other things to think about, who in his eyes read only a voracious, cold curiosity, in him see the vulture and the hyena. Also: reconstruct as well as he can, on the basis of bits of information extorted from grim reticence, the multiple pileup in the fog, the factory disaster, the collapse, the tanker truck that crashes and spills its contents (with a chemical name never heard before, unpronounceable) whose properties, use, destination he doesn’t know. If he feels the temptation to judgment or comment, he has to repress it; that’s not for him, it’s for the one who comes afterward and has the right to the signature. He has to be objective! A lens, like that of his colleague and consort the photographer.
What more do we expect of him, we hurried, distracted readers, besieged by our own problems? We expect it all: we would like the reporter to be a 360-degree periscope, who sifts through the entire mass of news that develops in the world in twenty-four hours, throws out the chaff, and gives us the wheat: solid, nutritious, pure. In short, we ask too much, we are greedy.
And yet here I would like, if I may, in my personal capacity, to make some recommendations. He should never forget the power he holds: unlike what happened in Fascist times (when the regime forbade news of suicides and abortions), the reporter today has some discretionary faculties; since he can’t recount everything, let him choose the essential, the news that is not fleeting, not useless. Don’t tempt the reader’s morbid curiosity; treat him as a responsible adult, even if he is not always that. Avoid the vagaries of the moment, which are dubious and immediately forgotten. Don’t pretend to have understood what you haven’t; it’s pointless to put in quotes terms whose meaning you don’t know—the reader will simply get an impression of confusion and obscurity. If space allows, don’t leave out “the conclusions of the preceding chapters,” especially when it comes to political news; not all readers read the daily daily, and not all have a good memory. And, most of all, remember that for most citizens “appearing in the paper” is unpleasant, harmful, or tragic: writing can be detrimental to legitimate interests, violate privacy, and wound sensibilities; but it can also right wrongs, and focus our attention on the most current matters. If, starting some ten years ago, public opinion has evolved, and if the citizen today perceives the problems of drugs, of urban decay, of organized crime as his own, in all their complexity and articulation, we owe it, in large part, to the “unknown reporter.” A civilized and responsible reporter is at once a mirror and the basis of a civilized and responsible society.
Almanacco di Cronaca 1984, Gruppo Cronisti Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta