“When everyone thinks the same way, no one thinks much.” Walter Lippmann said so. Professor Sabino Cassese, do you think there is an attempt underway in Italy today to standardize thoughts in information?
«That book by Walter Lippmann on public opinion came out in the United States in 1922. 102 years have passed. Since then, two important and complex changes have occurred in public opinion. The first: the parties, a great instrument for forming public opinion, as well as for organizing consensus and selecting the ruling class, have grown in importance and then, for at least thirty years, the parties have been shrinking and drying up. Once upon a time, in republican history, 8% of the population were members of parties, now members do not exceed 2%. According to internal estimates, the party with the largest number of members today only has 200 thousand (for comparison, there are 46 million people entitled to vote). The second upheaval began about thirty years ago and is the replacement or support of the media (newspapers, radio and television) with the web. These are completely different communication tools. The web is a “many to many” communication tool, from many to many, without a filter. Traditional media are a “one to many” communication tool, from one to many, manned by individuals called journalists, who are great evaluators, selectors, classifiers, interpreters of reality. I don’t think that today there is an attempt at standardization, but there is an unawareness on the part of the media of the fundamental role that they must play on two fronts: on the one hand, on the absence of the parties, to fill a void ; on the other, that of the network, to ensure a filter.”
Did the media fill the void that was created due to the absence of the parties?
«This is the critical point. Walter Lippmann said that newspapers help us judge the world. They do this in some countries. Open an Italian newspaper, listen to the radio, turn on the television and notice which news items are in the foreground, or which take up the most space and how they are commented on, if the great underground movements of our country are captured. If we were to imagine a conversation between Usbek and Rica, the two fictional characters of one of the most important books in the history of culture, Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” (1721), we should imagine that Rica, from Italy, writes to Usbek that the peninsula is dominated by murders and murders, especially of women, as well as serious incidents, due to the prominence given to them by the media; that an education system, a school, does not exist, due to the silence observed on this issue; that serious health problems depend only on the absence of doctors. A world of epiphenomena, not phenomena; the smallest event, instead of the important one; the surface of the facts, not the substance.”
Do the media perform their role badly, in short?
«Stereotypes dominate. The favorite one is the “storm” stereotype. Another very welcome one is the duel. Mottos, phrases, slogans are communicated. No reasons are clarified. Therefore, an asphyxiated public opinion. Tools that are unable to choose the relevant facts, as Lippmann taught, nor to explain and reason before taking sides. The political class has adapted to all this and, in the absence of media attention for programmes, prospects for the future and directions, is also reduced to daily slogans, often denied the next day, with the consequence that the “Public opinion is dazed and the relationship between state and society is in crisis, as can be seen by observing the decline in voters, because public opinion is essential for democracy.”
There are three things that concern everyone, absolutely all Italians: healthcare, school and information. Does the latter work worse than the others?
«These would be the topics to be informed and discussed on a daily basis, collecting data, providing statistics, commenting, establishing priorities. In this way, the media should exercise their great role as educators and selectors in a world in which parties are no longer shapers of public opinion and the web operates, which however has no filters. As for the comparative functioning of the three sectors, health, school and information together present both elements that are characteristic of a prismatic country like Italy: a few truly admirable points of excellence, which are accompanied by widespread malfunction, obscurity, malaise” .
Shouldn’t Rai be the right place to watch the world?
«For Rai, what I just said can be repeated: there are exceptions there too, but they fail to become “best practices”, i.e. models to follow. This is all the more serious for Rai as it is a collective heritage that should have ears open to the world, eyes wide open to reality, a voice capable of discussing and selecting, avoiding getting lost in the search for butterflies under the arch of Tito, to repeat a famous expression of Carducci’s barbaric Odes”.
Do you find that the level of public service has dropped? And if so, why? Is it the fault of intrusive politics?
«I don’t follow her in dwelling on daily changes. We must consider long-term trends, where the intensity changes, but unfortunately the direction is the same: excessive attention to breaking news, little reflection on what happened yesterday or the day before yesterday, the search for a duel to attract public attention, little study of the great currents and transformations of society, a partisan vision”.
What were the best seasons of public service in your opinion?
«I think that they were the founding years, but that that initial heritage was quickly dispersed and I think that that would not have been enough in the presence of the upheavals that have occurred in the last thirty years, from which we started in this conversation».
Don’t you think that, amidst the proliferation of media, TV should carve out another type of story?
«If surveys show that for Italians the number of foreigners residing in the peninsula is three times the real one, this does not mean that there is a failure of public opinion information tools, which are unable to convey simple data , which is enough to acquire by going to the website of the National Institute of Statistics?”.
Does information in Italy need more freedom or more competence?
«Competence, competence, competence and a lot of work, because this is how freedom can be ensured».
The war for power in information in Italy has always existed. Is it a wrong war? A just war? A natural war?
«It is a just and natural war, but we don’t realize that the theater of war has changed, because the media have remained the only shapers of public opinion due to the absence of the parties, and they are undermined by the web».
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