“Okay, boss. I’m off.”
“Hold on, because this is where Domani’s entire mission comes into play. You’ll remember that over the next few days they tried to play down the importance of the event. Bettino Craxi would say that Chiesa was just a small-time crook, and he was about to expel him from the Socialist Party, but what the reader couldn’t have known on February 18 was that the prosecutors were still investigating, and that a new magistrate was emerging, a man called Antonio Di Pietro, a real mastiff — he’s well known now, but at the time no one had ever heard of him. Di Pietro put the thumbscrews on Chiesa, discovered the Swiss bank accounts, made him confess that it wasn’t an isolated case, and now he’s slowly bringing to light a whole web of political corruption involving all parties. And the first effects have been felt these past few days — you’ve seen that the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party have lost a hell of a lot of votes in the elections, and that the Northern League has come out stronger, riding the scandal with its scorn for the rulers in Rome. Arrests are coming thick and fast, the political parties are slowly collapsing, and there are those who say that now the Berlin Wall is down and the Soviet Union in pieces, the Americans no longer need to worry about manipulating political parties and have left everything in the hands of the magistrates — or perhaps, we might guess, the magistrates are following a script written by the American secret services... But let’s not jump to conclusions for the moment. This is the situation today. No one on February 18 could have imagined what would happen. But Domani will imagine it and make a series of forecasts. And I’ll give this article of suppositions and innuendoes to you, Lucidi, you are so skilled in the use of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ and will report what actually happened. Name a few politicians from among the various parties, implicate the Left as well, let it be understood that the newspaper is collecting other evidence, and say it in such a way as to put the fear of God into those who will be reading our issue number 0/1 knowing full well what has transpired since February. But they’re going to ask themselves what there might be in a zero issue of today’s date... Understood? So, to work.”
“Why are you giving me the job?” asked Lucidi.
Simei gave him a strange look, as though he ought to have understood something that we hadn’t: “Because I know you’re pretty good at finding out what’s being said and fitting it to those responsible.”
Later, when the two of us were alone, I asked Simei what he had meant. “Don’t breathe a word to anyone,” he said, “but I believe Lucidi is tied up with the secret services and using journalism as a cover.”
“You’re saying he’s a spy? Why would we want a spy on our staff?”
“Because it’s of no consequence that he’s spying on us. What can he say, other than what the secret services would find out by reading any of our dummy issues? But he could bring us information he’s picked up while spying on others.”
Simei may not be a great journalist, I thought, but he’s a genius of his kind. And it reminded me of the comment attributed to an orchestral conductor, a great foul mouth, who described a musician by saying, “’E’s a god of ’is kind — ’e’s the kind that’s shit.”
5
Friday, April 10
While we were still thinking about what to put into issue number 0/1, Simei gave everyone a broad outline of the essential aspects of our work.
“So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it’s possible to respect, or appear to respect, one fundamental principle of democratic journalism, which is separating fact from opinion. A great many opinions will be expressed in Domani, and they’ll be clearly identified as such, but how do we show that elsewhere articles give only facts?”
“Simple,” I said. “Take the major British or American newspapers. If they report, say, a fire or a car accident, then obviously they can’t indulge in saying what they think. And so they introduce into the piece, in quotation marks, the statements of a witness, a man in the street, someone who represents public opinion. Those statements, once put in quotes, become facts — in other words, it’s a fact that that person expressed that opinion. But it might be assumed that the journalist has only quoted someone who thinks like him. So there will be two conflicting statements to show, as a fact, that there are varying opinions on a particular issue, and the newspaper is taking account of this irrefutable fact. The trick lies in quoting first a trivial opinion and then another opinion that is more respectable, and more closely reflects the journalist’s view. In this way, readers are under the impression that they are being informed about two facts, but they’re persuaded to accept just one view as being more convincing. Let’s give an example: a bridge has collapsed, a truck has fallen over the edge, and the driver has been killed. The article, after carefully reporting the facts, will say: We interviewed Signor Rossi, age forty-two, proprietor of a newsstand on the street corner. ‘What do you expect? That’s fate,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for the poor driver, but it’s the way things go.’ Immediately after, there’s Signor Bianchi, age thirty-four, a builder working on a nearby construction site, who’ll say, ‘The local authority’s to blame, this bridge has had problems, they’ve known about it for some time.’ Who is the reader going to identify with? With the one who’s being critical, who’s pointing the finger of blame. Clear? The problem is what to put in quotes, and how to do it. Let’s try a couple of exercises. We’ll start with you, Costanza. A bomb has exploded in Piazza Fontana.”
Costanza thought for a moment, then unleashed: “Signor Rossi, age forty-one, local authority employee, who might have been in the bank when the bomb exploded, told us, ‘I was not far away and felt the blast. It was horrendous. Someone is behind this with an agenda of their own, but we’ll never find out who.’ Signor Bianchi, age fifty, a barber, was also passing by at the time of the explosion, which he recalls as deafening and terrible, and commented, ‘It has all the makings of an anarchist attack, there’s no doubt about it.’”
“Excellent. Signorina Fresia, news arrives of the death of Napoleon.”
“Well, I’d say that Monsieur Blanche (let’s take his age and profession as read) tells us that perhaps it was unfair to imprison someone on that island whose life was already over — poor man, he too had a family. Monsieur Manzoni, or rather Manzonì, tells us, ‘We have lost someone who has changed the world, from the Manzanares to the Rhine. A great man.’”
“Manzanares, that’s good,” Simei said, smiling. “But there are other ways of passing on opinions undetected. To know what to include in a newspaper, you have, as journalists say, to set the agenda. There’s no end of news in this world. But why report an accident up here in the North, in Bergamo, and ignore another that’s taken place down south in Messina? It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news. And if you know how to put four different news items together, then you can offer the reader a fifth. Here’s a newspaper from the day before yesterday. On the same page: Milan, newborn child tossed into toilet; Pescara, brother not to blame for Davide’s death; Amalfi, psychologist caring for anorexic daughter accused of fraud; Buscate, boy who killed an eight-year-old when he was fifteen released after fourteen years in reformatory. These four articles all appear on the same page, and the headline is ‘Child Violence and Society.’ They all certainly relate to acts of violence involving a child, but they are very different cases. Only one (the infanticide) involves violence by parents on a child; the business of the psychologist doesn’t seem to relate to children, since the age of this anorexic girl isn’t given; the story of the boy from Pescara proves, if anything, that no violence occurred and the boy died accidentally; and finally the Buscate case, on closer reading, involves a hoodlum of almost thirty, and the real news was fourteen years ago. So what is the newspaper saying on this page? Perhaps nothing intentional, perhaps an idle editor found himself with four agency dispatches and thought it was a good idea to run them together to produce a stronger effect. But in fact the newspaper is transmitting an idea, an alarm signal, a warning... And in any case, think of the reader: each of these news items, taken individually, would have had little impact, but together they force the reader to stay on that page. Understood? I know it’s commonly said that if a laborer attacks a fellow worker, then the newspapers say where he comes from if he’s a southerner but not if he comes from the North. All right, that’s racism. But imagine a page on which a laborer from Cuneo, etc. etc., a pensioner from Mestre kills his wife, a news vendor from Bologna commits suicide, a builder from Genoa signs a bogus check. What interest is that to readers in the areas where these people were born? Whereas if we’re talking about a laborer from Calabria, a pensioner from Matera, a news vendor from Foggia, and a builder from Palermo, then it creates concern about criminals coming up from the South, and this makes news... We’re a newspaper to be published in Milan, not down in Catania, and we have to bear in mind the feelings of readers in Milan. Note that ‘making news’ is a great expression. We’re the ones who make the news, and we must know how to make it emerge between the lines. Dottor Colonna, you’ll spend your free hours with our news team, looking through the agency dispatches, building up pages around a theme, learning to create news where there wasn’t any, or where it wasn’t to be seen. All right?”