The Polemics of the Sixties and Seventies
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?
The Daily Becomes a Weekly
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
