From the sale of Repubblica and La Stampa to the role of Elkann and De Benedetti: a reflection on the fate of newspapers, on the publishers who buy and use them, on the left and on the end of the party newspaper.
I read the article that Marco Damilano wanted to dedicate il Domani to the sale of Republic and of Press. Rightly, the former director of L’Espresso says that Jaki Elkann he is getting rid of the Turin newspaper like one does with a used car that is no longer needed. And then that Gianni Agnelli’s nephew, to whom the judge for preliminary investigations denied the dismissal, imposing forced indictment for fraudulent declarationhas put the newspaper founded by for sale Eugenio Scalfari like you do with an old wardrobe that doesn’t fit in your new apartment. In the end, if you don’t know what to do with what you’ve inherited, you turn to eBay, hoping that there is a lover of the find, perhaps a foreigner, who doesn’t understand much about the junk you’re foisting on them.
The reality behind the story
In fact, Damilano’s story coincides with reality. Elkann first sold the Press to the children of De Benedetti because it reminded him of an old painting by a démodé painter. Then he took back La Stampa and La Repubblica too, because someone must have told him that the newspapers could cover his retreat from Italy, especially with the union. Giampaolo Pansawho was at home at Repubblica and L’Espresso before fleeing in nausea, years ago wrote a wonderful book dedicated to the world of publishing. It was called Bought and sold. If he could write another one on the same topic today, I’m sure he would call it Bought and used. Yes, because the history of printed paper of the last 40 years is this.
Bought and used
When Carlo De Benedetti he took over the shares of Repubblica, certainly not because he admired the journalistic qualities of the founder. Of him, while we were sitting in the living room on Via Ciovassino in Milan, in a house furnished with sumptuousness by the architect Mongiardino, he told me: «When he gave me Meeting with Me (an essay that came out in 1994, ed.), I read the first 10 pages and I understood that I had to look for a new editor of Repubblica”. And in fact he replaced it a year later, as one does with an old dresser. The acid sarcasmwho spares no one, not even his children, has always been a distinctive trait of the Engineer, who is ready to give lessons to everyone unless he never learns one: for this reason he destroyed everything he touched, except his bank account. De Benedetti has the newspapers bought and used. He didn’t do it for the love of culture, freedom of the press and the left, as he is wont to believe. He did it to make money and defend himself from accusations that he never had limits when it came to accumulating it. Believe that Matteo Renziwhen every week he received him at Palazzo Chigi, where he once told him that he would reform the cooperative banks, offering the Engineer another opportunity to get rich, did he welcome him because he considered De Benedetti a nice snack companion? Obviously not, he invited him because he was the editor of Repubblica and at that time newspapers were still useful.
Ideals exchanged for business
Damilano says that the Italian bourgeoisie has lost its soul, which has exchanged influence for influencers, innovation for marketing, public debate for a communications company. Maybe. But above all he exchanged the ideal with business. When the Democratic Party was born in 2007, the Engineer, who was still active, said he wanted the first party card of Walter Veltronialso known as Uolter Banaloni for his profound and sugary arguments. Together with De Benedetti, bankers queued at the gazebos, from Perfume to Modianowith the generous condescension of Nagel. Here you are, bought and used. Left-wing journalists have succumbed to the charms of daneas they call money in Milan, imagining that entrepreneurs and financiers who declared themselves to be left-wing would open the rooms of the good salons for them. The result is that, thirty years later, those same journalists realize that their comrades with yachts and bank accounts have emptied their daily living room, reducing it to a useless newspaper, and that Jaki Elkann he is ready to sell to anyone who relieves him of the problem. The party newspaperwhich dictated the line to the PCI and the strong powers, is no longer there. That newspaper is dead and even the party – or rather what remains of it – doesn’t feel so good.
Damilano’s omissions
The colleague mourns the disappearance of «a system that held together politics as thought and battle of ideas, entrepreneurship as courage, and intellectuality as restlessness and not as complacency», rebuking the left, «very attentive to competing for the last deputy head of Rai and totally absent while entire pieces of territory and democracy disappeared in private information». In the long article, however, two things are silent. The first is his CVfrom left-wing organic intellò. For five years he directed The Expressfirst with De Benedetti and then with Agnelli, and when they put it up for sale, abandoning it in the hands of an oilman, as soon as he left his job in the historic weekly, he was given a Rai broadcast, because the Journalistic caste of the left he never leaves anyone on the street. The second concerns the newspaper in which he wrote about the end of Repubblica, namely the Tomorrow. It is financed by Carlo De Benedetti, who has lost all or almost all of his group, but not his passion for influencing politics. After all, he was the first great one influencers which Damilano complains about. It’s with him that it all begins, starting with the Repubblica disaster. And it is always with him and his scathing judgments that the cycle ends.
