The Press no. 22/2000
Sometimes it is really white. There is no point in putting on glasses, stretching it out neatly on a perfectly smooth surface, without a gust of wind to spoil a corner of it. It remains white.
One may wonder whose fault it is. On some days this question remains the only jolt of interest the paper offers. And after the moment of presumptuousness of the fresh headline, the resignation of the foregone end of wrapping eggs or lining old trunks carrying in yellowing the pride of a great signature, the fear of a war correspondent, the boredom of a waffler.
There are days when no news touches us, let alone shocks us. No lofty typographic proposal can glamorize us. We have our own personal paper in the lead. Which is not about international disputes or parliamentary reversals. It is built on fundamental and indispensable topics, described in clear words, on programs concerning duties that do not admit of comment. In those days the efforts of opinion leaders and anchor men are in vain. Instead of surprising us, they recruit our boredom.
Amnesty or pardon for one month and then nothing more. Entry and work permits for immigrants, and then on to magniloquent lucubrations about smoking-yes-smoking-no or biotechnology and transgenic foods. The views of all, but really all, politicians on Gay Pride. German-style electoral law, Portuguese-style, Peruvian-style, and then dive into De Mauro’s promises calling for bigger salaries for teachers thanks to gaming revenue. The new election law, which is not there, thanks, and the teachers also.
Newspapers and television stations compete in their shamanic dances around the sacred pyres on which news is immolated. It is the same meat-grinder logic that reduces everything to the usual script for media theater and that jolts us from Italians’ fears of crime, from the nun dying on her knees, to the pink, pink-bagged, pink-shoed, pink-hatted, pink-gloved captains and the gins at eleven o’clock in the morning of the centenarian and spendthrift Queen Mother, through the crowned and crowned Emanuele Filiberto and his genuflections to the Republic.
All in vain. Every morning there is, in eight columns, a single headline. The one about your life, with the sorrows, the loves, the unspoken sentences, the resolutions, the despairs, the joys, the small, slight things that allow you to go on living, the poetry you can recognize in the things that happen to you. Everything else is fleeting, modifiable and discretionary outline. Save only, for example, someone like Adriano Sofri who has no debate to offer and no commentary to comment on and only tells us simple stories of female prisoners making themselves pretty and shining their shoes because news of the pardon might come. We need these stories that, though it may not seem like it, are very much like us because they are not curiosities to relieve us from boredom, but truths.
And then the fake news, the real news, the bona fide news, the ghoulish news, the dangerous news, but especially the comments on the news, which are also too dissimilar to be considered reliable, end up steeping in water to make paper mache for puppets, toys, carnival floats. And children’s eyes will be wide open, interested and satisfied. All in all, it is not little.
