I admire a lot Enrico Franceschini (I would have written envy, but envy is a bad thing …). He is a great journalist, he was a correspondent and sent to the most interesting squares to tell. Yet he manages to find the time, the way and the inspiration to write (good) novels.
We are not talking about Dickens or Hugo, he is the first to know, but his novels are light and well written, well constructed and with an idea inside. In these days his came back to me Scoop (2017), which is dedicated to journalism and which more than others is obviously autobiographical. I thought about it, noting the fact that there are fewer and fewer newspaper reporters in the dangerous places where history is made. For example in Kabul. A little depends on security (journalism pays an important toll of victims every year, and I also include photographers and video operators in this speech). And a little from cost reasons: sending a reporter to a distant area where there is a conflict costs. And so there are fewer and fewer reporters and even press agencies, which should be the primary source of information, now translate international agencies or (increasingly) draw on social media.
A few days ago a colleague wrote that we are creating “influencer journalists”, that is, that they limit themselves to handling the material of social networks to build reports that are not actually stories from the front, but summaries (well) made from the desk at home. This is why I was reminded of Franceschini’s novel which ironically celebrates the deeds of a group of Italian special envoys in a Central American country during a civil war many years ago. The characters of Scoop they are obviously fictional, but many will recognize us something of some giants of our journalism. In short, what are our envoys doing at the front? Some they stay in the luxury hotel with swimming pool where they are staying and follow the events on TV, others get informed by the taxi drivers who take them around, still others invent interviews in the jungle where they have never been sure they can not be proven wrong. At the time there was no network, there were no social networks: did you see a guerrilla denying it? It is a novel, Scoop, and as such it should be taken.
youtube: il trailer del film Special Correspondents
Journalism, we said, has a long list of heroic reporters who have lost their lives to tell a story. But today it is possible to tell about Afghanistan also using the myriad of information that comes from social media, learning to distinguish authentic news from lies, identifying the best things and discarding propaganda, making contact with the most reliable sources that are on the spot. It is not trivial, it requires competence and seriousness, but it is possible, also aided by the automatic translation tools of social networks and the ease with which fact-checking can be done.
In short, going to places, “wearing out the soles of your shoes”, as they used to say, remains the main road (read an old book by Tiziano Terzani, who was really in Afghanistan, if you want to understand what is happening today). But more and more often that road is closed. And then “the correspondent on social networks” becomes an important evolution of our profession that does not necessarily create worse information.
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