by Umberto Eco
“Me? But I’m broke, like you.”
“Really? I’ve no idea what Simei pays you and I’ve no right to know. Anyway, no harm asking. But you’ll pay the bill?”
That’s how I got to know Braggadocio.
4
Wednesday, April 8
NEXT DAY WE HAD OUR first real editorial meeting. “Let’s start,” said Simei. “Let’s start with the newspaper for February 18 of this year.”
“Why February 18?” asked Cambria, who would distinguish himself from then on as always asking the most ridiculous questions.
“Because this winter, on February 17, the police raided the office of Mario Chiesa, president of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio and a leading figure in Milan’s Socialist Party. I’m sure you all recall this: Chiesa had asked for bribes on a contract given to a cleaning company from Monza, a deal worth a hundred and forty million lire, on which he was demanding ten percent. You see how even an old people’s home makes a pretty fine cow to milk. And it could hardly have been the first time; the cleaning company was tired of coughing up and reported Chiesa to the police. So the person who went to deliver the first installment of the agreed fourteen million arrived with a hidden camera and a microphone. The moment Chiesa had taken the money, the police burst into his office. In terror, he went to the drawer, grabbed another, larger bundle he’d already collected from someone else, and rushed to the bathroom to flush the banknotes down the toilet, but it was no use, he was in handcuffs before he could get rid of the cash. This is the story, as you all remember. So now, Cambria, you know what we have to report in our newspaper for the day after. Go to the archive, read up on the news for that day, and give us an opening column. Or rather, no—write us a nice little article, since, as I recall, there was no mention of this story on the television news that evening.”
“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?”
Another topic was the Denial. We were still a newspaper without any readers, and so there was no one to challenge any of the news that we provided. But a newspaper is also judged by its capacity to handle denials, especially if it’s a newspaper that shows it doesn’t mind getting its hands dirty. Also, by training ourselves for the real denials when they came, we could invent letters from readers that we follow up with a denial. Just to let the Commendatore see what we are capable of.
“I discussed this yesterday with Dottor Colonna. And Colonna would like to give you a little talk on the technique of denial.”
“So,” I began, “let’s give a textbook example, which is not only fictitious but also, let’s say, rather far-fetched: a letter-of-denial parody that appeared a few years go in L’Espresso. The assumption was that the magazine had heard from a certain Signor Preciso Perniketti as follows.”
Dear Editor:
With reference to your article “Ides Murder Suspect Denies All” by Veruccio Veriti, which appeared in the last issue of your magazine, please allow me to correct the following matters. It is not true that I was present at the assassination of Julius Caesar. Please kindly note from the enclosed birth certificate that I was born at Molfetta on March 15, 1944, many centuries after the regrettable event, which moreover I have always deplored. Signor Veriti must have misunderstood me when I told him I invariably celebrate March 15, 1944, with a few friends. It is likewise incorrect that I later told a certain Brutus: “We will meet again at Philippi.” I wish to state that I have never had any dealings with anyone called Brutus, whose name I heard for the first time yesterday. During the course of our brief telephone interview, I did indeed tell Signor Veriti that I would soon be meeting the city’s assistant traffic officer, Signor Philippi, but the statement was made in the context of a conversation about the circulation of automobile traffic. In this context, I never said that I had appointed assassins to get rid of that traitorous bully Julius Caesar, but rather, “I had an appointment with the assistant traffic officer to get rid of traffic in Boulevard Julius Caesar.”
Yours faithfully,
Preciso Perniketti
“How do you deal with such a clear denial without losing face? Here’s a good way of replying.”
I note that Signor Perniketti does indeed not deny that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March of ’44. I also note that Signor Perniketti always celebrates the anniversary of March 15, 1944, with friends. It was this most curious practice that I wished to report in my article. Signor Perniketti may well have personal reasons for celebrating that date with copious libations, but he will no doubt agree that the coincidence is, to say the least, strange. He will furthermore recall that, during the long and detailed telephone interview with me, he stated, “I believe one should always render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” A source close to Signor Perniketti—which I have no reason to doubt—has assured me that that which was rendered unto Caesar was twenty-three stab wounds. And I note that Signor Perniketti is careful throughout to avoid telling us who actually inflicted those stab wounds.
As for the pitiful denial about Philippi, I have my notebook in front of me where it is clearly recorded that Signor Perniketti did not say “We will meet again at Philippi’s office” but “We will meet again at Philippi.”
I can give the same assurance regarding words threatening to Julius Caesar. The notes in my notebook, which I have before me, distinctly say, “appt ass. t. o. get rid of tr. bl. Julius Caesar.” These attempts to show that black is white and to play around with words are no way to avoid such weighty responsibility, or to gag the press.
“It is signed by Veruccio Veriti. So, what’s the point of this denial of a denial? Point number one, that the newspaper has received the information from sources close to Signor Perniketti. This always works. The sources aren’t given, but it implies the newspaper has confidential sources, perhaps more reliable than Perniketti. Use is then made of the journalist’s notebook. No one will ever see the notebook, but the idea of an actual record tends to inspire confidence in the newspaper and suggests that there is evidence. Lastly, insinuations are made that are meaningless in themselves but throw a shadow of suspicion over Perniketti. Now, I don’t say all denials have to take this form—this is just a parody—but keep in mind the three fundamental elements for a denial of a denial: other sources, notes in the reporter’s notebook, and doubts about the reliability of the person making the denial. Understood?”
“Very good,” they replied in chorus. And the following day, each brought examples of rather more credible denials, along with denials of denials less grotesque but equally effective. My five students had understood the lesson.
Maia Fresia proposed: “‘We take note of the denial but point out that what we have reported appears in the official record of the investigating magistrates, namely in the preliminary notification to the accu
sed.’ What readers don’t know is that the magistrates then decided not to proceed against Perniketti. They don’t know that the official record was a confidential document, nor is it clear how it was obtained, or how genuine it was. I’ve done what you asked, Dottor Simei, but if you’ll allow me, this seems a pretty lousy trick.”
“My dear,” replied Simei, “it would be even more lousy for the newspaper to admit it hadn’t checked its sources. But I agree that rather than giving out information someone would be able to check, it’s better to limit yourself to insinuation. Insinuation doesn’t involve saying anything in particular, it just serves to raise a doubt about the person making the denial. For example: ‘We are happy to note the explanation, but we understand that Signor Perniketti’—always keep to Signor, rather than Onorevole or Dottor; Signor is the worst insult in our country—‘has sent dozens of denials to countless newspapers. This must indeed be a full-time compulsion.’ This way, readers become convinced he is paranoid. You see the advantage of insinuation: by saying that Perniketti has written to other newspapers, we are simply telling the truth, which can’t be denied. The most effective insinuation is the one that gives facts that are valueless in themselves, yet cannot be denied because they are true.”
With these recommendations clear in our minds, we began what Simei termed a brainstorming session. Palatino reminded us that he had previously worked on a puzzle magazine, and he suggested the newspaper include half a page of games, along with television schedules, weather, and horoscopes.
“Horoscopes, of course!” Simei said. “Great that you reminded us, they’re the first things our readers will be looking for! Yes, of course, this is your first task, Signorina Fresia. Go read a few newspapers and magazines that publish horoscopes, and take some of the recurring themes. But keep to optimistic predictions—people don’t like being told that next month they’re going to die of cancer. And give predictions that will apply to everyone, by which I mean that a woman of sixty isn’t going to be interested in the prospect of meeting the young man of her life, whereas the prediction, let’s say, that some event in the coming months will bring this Capricorn lasting happiness will suit everybody—adolescents (if they ever read it), aging spinsters, and office clerks waiting for a pay raise. But let’s address the games, my dear Palatino. What do you suggest? Crosswords?”
