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If everything is changing around us in the world of information, does it also mean that
the relationship between citizen and democracy is changing in any way? This is the
fundamental question facing us in the years which have seen an unbelievable
multiplication of centres of information, a decline in printed news, the unstoppable
advance of the internet, and public opinion fragmented over the various websites,
influenced by blogs and grouped into the new social network communities. Everything
is changing, except one point which remains the same: information is a right of all
citizens, information is a function of democracy.
According to some scholars – and I cite Robert Dahl to represent all of them – to have a
good democracy, citizenship is not sufficient because it is more useful to have an
“illuminated citizenship”, made up of subjects who are informed and thus are aware, or
rather are aware precisely because they are informed. We are all equal as citizens, that
much is obvious and thank goodness this is the case. But only citizens who have the
information needed to understand certain phenomena can really give life to that delicate
element, indispensable for western democracies, which goes under the name of public
opinion. If citizens are not aware, we are not talking about public opinion but about
common sense, which is something completely different from the point of view of the
physiology of a democratic society, and also from the point of view of the relationship
between citizens and power.
In the last twenty years the growth in information has been explosive in terms of
quantity, and this is in itself a value, because it is accompanied by a greater ease of
access, a multiplication of sources, and a concrete realization of pluralism. But if the
quantity of information is important, the quality is also fundamental, indeed a particular
type of quality, which helps people to distinguish, understand and form a judgement: i.e.
organized information, which means information inserted in a broad scale of references
which not only give visibility to the protagonists but also to the interests which
influence them, relating these interests to the general interest, going back to precedents
and making projections about consequences, taking ultimate responsibility for a
comment. In short, giving the reader a summary of the general context in which the fact
or event takes place.
The exchange is in the quality of the information given to the citizen to foster his
independent free understanding of the facts. A newspaper cannot and does not aim to
bind readers to its own opinion because it is not a political party: it is much less
although in reality it is much more than that – albeit with totally different functions –
because the relationship between the newspaper and its readers transforms the whole
into a live community where the one influences the other, in the name of what it
actually is that is bought and sold on the news-stands, which is to say an identity, a
system of ideas which organizes and prioritizes the news of the day, putting it in order.
In the name not of a political orientation, which fortunately ended with the century of
ideologies: but rather in the name of a way of viewing the world and one’s own country,
in the name of a window on life, of a system of values, of that which Piero Gobetti
called (in a way that means a lot to us at Repubblica) “a certain idea of Italy”.
Bearing in mind that in a democratic society it must be politics that sits at the head of
the table, because it is politics that must deal the cards and look after the pack, because
only politics can regulate the free-for-all of legitimate interests at play, reconciling it
with the general interest.
Thus we can understand what a scholar like Neil Postman meant when he said that
democracy is “print-related”: because the mind of the citizen-reader who is at the heart
of community issues in the western world is print-related. Indeed we could say that the
readers of newspapers are the ideal subjects of a democracy, citizens who are aware
because they are informed. Going one step further: the citizen reader is probably the
homo sapiens of this century, in which at a superficial level we are celebrating the end
of newspapers.
If this is the relationship between newspapers, citizens and democracy, if this triangle
can hold up against the crisis and the triumph of the internet, what sense is there in the
old question which gets asked of newspapers: “Who do you support?” It is high time we
abandoned this question and moved on to the real question for liberal democracies to
ask of a newspaper: “Who are you”? Because it is only if I really know the nature, the
soul and the culture of a newspaper, its editorial history, the transparent identity of its
ownership, only then can I understand what its “idea of the country and of the world” is.
Only then can I finally understand why the paper takes certain positions, and is for or
against these or those people. Not as part of an abstract ideological design but because
the way it is leads it to support a measure, to pass judgement on another one and to
conduct a political and cultural battle.
One could say that by doing this in the tiny space they have at their disposal, the papers
work on the cultural foundations of a community, trying to give the reader, disorientated
by the lack of sound and permanent points of reference, those elements of experience
and intellectual cohesion which make it possible to view events in a way that is not
purely one-off and emotional. A particularly useful function at a time when, as Zygmunt
Bauman says, “nothing lasts long enough to be fully acquired”.
If all this is true we can understand why the conflict between newspapers and power
still exists even in the internet era, as their relationship remains perforce a difficult one.
Indeed if this is the democratic function of newspapers, apart from their obligation to
give the news, those in power (of whatever political view) are bound to find it a
nuisance, an inconvenient filter between what governments call the people and what the
papers consider as citizens, and the sphere of government. The Italian situation is even
more complex, even starting with structural data. For years now, the ratio of newspaper
copies sold to population has not exceeded 10%, which is a Mediterranean ratio,
nowhere near the 28.9 copies per one hundred inhabitants sold in Germany, the 30.3 in
Austria and the 41.2 in Sweden.
This phenomenon can be partly explained by the space that television occupies. Italy is
a country in which television devours a proportion of the whole advertising pie which is
unequalled in any other democracy. According to World Press Trend 2003 the share
held by television in the US is no higher than 36 per cent, in Germany it is just over 33
per cent, while in Italy in 2007 it reached 54 per cent, forcing the newspapers to raise
their prices in order to survive, and making it virtually impossible for the weaker sectors
of the population, the hardest hit by the economic crisis, to buy them. In the very special
media diet of the Italians – studied by Censis in 2004 - 9.1 per cent of the population
only watch television, 37.5 per cent never read a book and do not even know what the
internet is. This is what Censis defines as a condition of “television isolation”, an
isolation common to 46.6 per cent of the population who have exposure to a single
media instrument on which they depend for all items of information and opinions on
public affairs.
This imbalance, which is evident to any observer, has an effect particularly on the
underlying cultural background of television channels, now uniform in terms of
language with identical ways of viewing things, and on the television news. In this
environment the task of newspapers – with their range of opinions – is even more
significant. Even though in this same environment it is easy for a paper to become
“heretical” vis-à-vis the mainstream precisely because it operates outside the common
knowledge given by the television news. At this point is it better to kowtow to the
mainstream or to accept the branding of heresy? The question is purely rhetorical: but
the answer is awkward. Because isolation, like solitude, is not a condition of freedom.
Everybody knows the 10 questions that Repubblica, the main newspaper of the
publishing Group of which I am chairman, had since May been asking the Prime
Minister every day for five months to answer (at last getting an answer albeit in an
indirect and oblique form) regarding the scandals which in the summer attracted the
attention of newspapers the world over. These questions arose when the paper believed
that it had found clear contradictions in the Premier’s statements, or between his
statements and those of other people involved. Repubblica officially asked the head of
the Government for an interview, to ask him the ten questions and clear up the
contradictions. It agreed with the undersecretary on a term of four days to obtain an
answer. After four days and no answers, it went ahead and published the questions. It is
the view of this newspaper, a view that has been expressed on many occasions, that
where there are contradictions in power, there is a natural space where journalism must
carry out an investigation.
I don’t wish to speak here about issues concerning the Premier, I want to talk about the
relationship between the press and those in power that arises from these issues. The
Prime Minister has in fact attacked the papers that have dealt with his scandal,
especially during an official meeting of young entrepreneurs at Santa Margherita Ligure
where he asked companies not to advertise in papers which he defined as “doom and
gloom merchants”, explaining later that he was referring specifically to Repubblica.
This is the first time, as has been noted, that a western political leader has tried to put
economic pressure on a paper which has been criticizing him with a view to weakening
it, thus interfering with the free market. That same political leader then publicly invited
the business people to boycott Repubblica (“you must rebel against Repubblica”, were
his actual words), and described two journalists of the paper who asked him a question
as “criminals”. He also told the correspondent of the Spanish paper Pais in Italy that he
hoped his paper would go bankrupt, because he had asked him about the scandal. He
has also advised Italians not to read the papers, explaining that there is good information
I would like to quote an opinion expressed by the young writer Roberto Saviano:
“freedom of the press also means the freedom not to have your life destroyed, not to be
attacked on a personal level, not to live under constant threat, having against you not a
different opinion but a campaign that aims to totally discredit anyone who expresses it”.
Clearly, political leaders the world over have the right to defend themselves from those
who attack them and even from those who criticize them. In a democracy, these leaders
defend themselves using the exceptional arms of their political influence - backed up by
the popular consent that elected them – and their role in the media. Never before has it
happened in the western world that a Prime Minister has used television channels and
newspapers under his control or ownership to attack on a personal level – not at the
level of ideas or opinions, as Saviano notes - anyone who criticizes him or expresses
opinions that are out of line. In Italy this is what has been happening in the last few
months and the editor of the bishops’ newspaper knows something about it because
after he had criticized those in power an anonymous statement was published accusing
him in police-style language of homosexuality. He was forced to resign from his
position.
The question of freedom of the press, in a democracy in the heart of Europe in 2009,
must therefore be reformulated in these terms: can intimidation, attacks, court action
and insults condition the free exercise of journalistic criticism, or even merely the
investigation and enquiry work? Can they be allowed to interfere with the serenity of a
journalist’s work, with his or her freedom of expression? Is there anyone who, on
switching on their computer to write a critical article about those in power, first thinks
about themselves, their personal life, any possible weaknesses they may have, any fears
and then thinks it’s better to keep well away, avoid problems, better not to bother? Does
all this reflect or not on the right of the citizen to be freely informed, i.e. on his or her
right to know about things, meaning to be able to take part in the normal physiological
confrontation between press and those in power, in total freedom and independence on
both sides?
In the modern populist culture, which is advancing in the West, the leader elected by
the people, precisely because of this special sacred “anointment”, considers him or
herself above all other powers, rejecting the idea of any balance of power, of any check
– whether by the press or by any other institution – because he or she does not recognize
their legitimacy. However when the constitutional order is that of classic western
parliamentary democracies, the conduct of leaders who follow populist culture often
leads to clashes, conflicts and abuses of power, which free journalism must of course
capture, highlight and denounce when it is convinced that it exists. In Italy in the last
few days the papers have a new case in front of them: the Prime Minister is designing a
law which, by reducing the time required for trials, will cancel two of his own trials
currently in progress in Milan, using a format which is a western anomaly that we could
define as follows: the executive using the legislative to stop the judicial.
Naturally the culture of the press as a free agent, not subordinate to anyone, representing
public opinion comes into conflict in all countries with those in power and even more so
with the culture of populist leadership, which is superordinate and above all control.
Indeed any criticism made by a newspaper in any country my be presented and
stigmatized as an act against the sovereignty of the people, against the vote which in
electing a leader admits no objection, against the union in one mystical body of the
Leader and his people, an entity in comparison with which the concept of citizen
becomes weaker day by day. This is cultural conditioning exerted against the press:
anyone who criticizes the leader is criticizing the popular vote, therefore criticizing a
power which is not only legitimate but is intangible, thus anyone who does so is
automatically a subverter. One step further and it is easy to accuse someone of being
unpatriotic. Because the leader and his people are united in a kind of sacred charismatic
rite which consecrates power in the interest, in the destiny even, of the nation, anyone
who criticises this union, weakens it or threatens it is acting against the interest of the
country, is doing something anti-national, unpatriotic. This is another of the threats – as
I have said, of a cultural nature in this case – to the freedom of the press, to its full
autonomy of action and its freedom to be critical. It is obvious that anyone who
criticizes the legitimate power – for something that they consider to be a mistake, an
error, an abuse – loves their country at least as much as those actually holding power:
they love their country through democracy, the constitution, respect for the institutions,
public rules of rights and obligations which are valid and must be valid for everyone,
those in government and citizens. Indeed, in the part of the world that we live in –
Quite simply, newspapers are a counter-measure, an antidote, which can carry out a
highly modern function. Because citizen-readers, freely informed citizens can develop