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.
The Ideology of Entertainment
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.
Dailies and TV
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
