from
Numero Zero
by
Umberto Eco

“Running a newspaper doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to write. The minister of defense doesn’t necessarily know how to lob a hand grenade.”

“Does he have that kind of money?”

“Don’t be naïve. We’re talking about finance, not business. First buy, then wait and see where the money to pay for it comes from.”

‘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.”

She was a blend of cheer and melancholy and was watching me with the eyes (how would a bad writer put it?) of a fawn.

Of a fawn? Ah, well . . . it’s just that, as we were walking, she looked up at me because I was taller than she was. And that was it. Any woman who looks at you from below looks like Bambi.

“This insistence on professionalism, that it’s something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy writers.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “Readers think that people generally are lousy workers, which is why we need examples of professionalism — it’s a more technical way of saying that everything’s gone well. The police have caught the chicken thief — and they’ve acted with professionalism.”

“But it’s like calling John XXIII the Good Pope. This presupposes the popes before him were bad.”

“Maybe that’s what people actually thought, otherwise he wouldn’t have been called good. [...]”

“But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit.”

“That’s right. Newspapers teach people how to think,” Simei said.

“But do newspapers follow trends or create them?”

“They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don’t know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let’s not get too involved in philosophy — we’re professionals.”