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.
The Interview
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.
The Press Talks about the Press
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,
