Dear Feltri,
In his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust revealed himself to be a good prophet a century ago when he wrote: “What I reproach newspapers for is making us pay attention every day to insignificant things, while we only read three or four books in our whole lives where there are essential things. We should reverse things and put in the newspaper the thoughts of
Pascal. While it is in one of those volumes that we open once every ten years that we should read that the Queen of Greece went to Cannes and that the Princess of Leon gave a costume ball.
Newspapers increasingly similar to gossip weeklies and reality TV news twins: this is the current journalistic landscape. What about the future?
Mauro July
Dear Mauro,
just in these last few days I’m making the same reflections as you. I don’t deny that the interest in the scabrous and spicy fact, especially if it involves public figures, both in the entertainment and in politics, has always been there on the part of public opinion and therefore of the media. We are curious, indeed it teases us, to observe through the keyhole, to know what happens in the rooms and private lives of popular individuals, we are satisfied by the idea that, after all, their existences are not different at all from ours and that they have our same problems, vices, troubles. We like to bring them back to the dimension of human beings because it comforts us.
However, it seems to me that nowadays this morbid interest is the prerogative of the media rather than of public opinion, which has had enough of it, and your letter, like those of many other readers who more or less express the same disappointment, demonstrates it: people are tired of reading stories, little facts, rumors, gossip and gossip built on nothing. Instead, the newspapers, increasingly intent not on informing but on discrediting the center-right, especially now that it has been called by Italians to lead the country,
they focus with doggedness and compulsiveness on trivial matters in an attempt, for example, to extract something substantial from the statements of the fiery Maria Rosaria Boccia, who to date has only threatened daily to bring out who knows what evidence and who knows what names without putting anything concrete on the table. But this is fine with the newspapers, which, exploiting the allusive phrases of Boccia, who seeks popularity, can weave their novels.
I was quite struck by the fact that now the one targeted is Minister Lollobrigida. On the basis of two photographs in which she appears together with Boccia on the occasion of public and official events, one would like to make us believe that there was much more between the two than this. I am ashamed of the drift taken by my colleagues, therefore by journalism. And I understand the feelings of impatience, disgust, boredom, perplexity on the part of you readers. In short, do we pretend to be credible by writing rubbish of this type every day?
I am not saying that we should only concern ourselves with cold data, statistics, news. But I am saying that we should not make newspapers, including the traditionally most prestigious ones, similar to mere gossip magazines, engaged in chatter, in something, as Proust said, insignificant.
You ask me if things can change in the future. They can even get worse, I doubt they will get better. I think a reversal of the trend and a sudden recovery of sanity, respect for the reader and the principles that form the basis of our profession, of good manners, of intellectual honesty, are difficult.
Furthermore, there will still be attempts to damage this executive in the only way considered illusorily possible yet ephemeral and vain, that is, by attacking individual ministers in their private and personal sphere with the aim of making them appear inadequate, unreliable, vile and, consequently, to discredit the one who chose them, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
This strategy doesn’t work, but it will be used again and again.
We will read some more good things. That is, some bullshit.