Of shelled clams and those who gobble them up as if they were the truth

Journalists – myself included, Montanelli included, everyone included – are a bunch of bullshitters. That is the plain truth. I won’t say anything about Cappellini and Mieli, because I believe in friendship and even cronyism, but I get the impression they’re a bunch of bullshitters too. Curiosity is the demon of the world’s oldest profession – not prostitution, but journalism, which resembles it like two peas in a pod. It is accompanied by ambition, a polemical and vindictive spirit, the creative illusion of the news, a frustrated aspiration to politics, a good dose of cowardice, systematic opportunism, well-deserved awards, and a spirit of corporatism and cliquishness. Naturally, I love them; I am the son of two such people, even though Italian communism spared the best—and indeed the worst—of them from certain flaws of journalism, as they peddled ideology and culture, lies on a massive, towering, global scale, sparing themselves the grotesque cult of facts and news, the superficial treatment of the presumption of truth, shelling the clams of history one by one, making despicable messes in the name of the cause and the Soviet bistro.

But it’s not them I want to focus on right now. I’m concerned about the consumers of journalism – readers, viewers and listeners. Their numbers are dwindling, becoming minuscule indeed. I’d like us to cherish them, even that sensational average 9 per cent audience share of the most ridiculous ‘truth-telling’ programme in the whole world – you know the one I’m talking about. And everyone knows their own audience, favours them and would never want to let them down. Yet I’d also like to guillotine them one by one, sneer at them, insult them politely, mock them mercilessly – these ‘investigative journalism’ addicts, a ludicrous genre that fancies itself objective, independent and sovereign. But just how gullible, know-it-all, angry, ridiculous, indignant and feeble-minded are certain dear friends – viewers near and far – who allow themselves to be taken in by a troglodyte who reviews his own work and calls it a ‘masterpiece’ under a false name, who allows himself to be polled, believes himself a leader, abandons a close friend to prison on Ferragosto and clings to his reputation as a victim of the system and of censorship, when in fact he is a protégé of Telemeloni and his officials, who are incapable even of telling him to get lost with his chats. I once thought that a newspaper was like an umbrella – a tool that nobody uses for personal purposes any more, an elegant accessory to one’s demeanour, a mark of bourgeois or working-class distinction: it has become the devalued, occasional head-cover that you snatch from a street vendor when it rains or the sun beats down, going hand in hand with social media and ‘flip-flop’ TV – these two scoundrels of the news world that we’d gladly do without, apart from tennis, football and the news, ‘Italy on a bed of shelled clams’, as Paolo would say if he were a shareholder.