Five Moral Pieces by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco [Eco, Umberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Whereas newspapers once had to send their spies into the corridors of power in Rome to wrangle cautious admissions out of people in the know, today if anything they have to guard against people who procure unsolicited, fat dossiers for them, whose contents, if not thoroughly checked out, are unwittingly amplified by the newspapers, which emerge as dupes and suffer a consequent loss of credibility. Newspapers now have to play a defensive game, parrying blows from outside.

Not that things go much differently elsewhere. In France, for example, there have recently been complaints that the struggle to get a scoop at all costs has violated the jealously guarded privacy of the president of the republic. The consequences of this race for scoops is revealed by a comparison between Nixon and Clinton.

Before the Washington Post's Watergate probe there had never been any attacks, other than political ones, on the presidency and its honorability. If we consider the extent of the deception itself, Nixon could easily have got around the problem by accusing overzealous associates. But he made the mistake of leading off with a lie. At that point the press campaign staked everything on the fact that the president of the United States had lied, and Nixon fell in the end not because he was indirectly guilty of a break-in, but because he was guilty of mendacity. The press's decision was therefore specific, accurate, and calibrated, and that was precisely why it was successful. What made the anti-Clinton campaign far more weak and disjointed is that these days we must have a scoop a day, and in order to have this no one hesitates to attribute to Bill and Hillary malfeasance of all kinds—from property speculation to using state funds to buy cat food. Overkill. Public opinion is disturbed by this, and remains basically skeptical. The final result, in the United States too, is an embitterment of the political struggle; a leader is replaced only if his opponents manage to have him jailed.

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