If you have to fill a column and are a little unsure of your facts or of the weight your own opinions will carry, just invent an authoritative source. Preferably, of course, it should be a plausible and wholly fictitious Professor Bunbury. But if your imagination will not run to that, and you feel in a reckless mood, then cite an actual person, preferably somebody unlikely to read what you have written. The only snag is that you have a good chance of being fired if your editor finds out. But not apparently in Italy.
It was the local baker who told me how much he had enjoyed reading an interview with me in a recent supplement of La Repubblica. I was a bit puzzled. I remembered a couple of messages on the answering machine from a certain Eugenio Occorsio of that paper. He had wanted to interview me about the recent round of US-Japan trade disputes. He had not rung back. Or had he? Old men forget, but surely not that much.
Show me, I said. And sure enough there was a long interview-questions and answers all in direct quotation-from a certain Ronald Dore, a 54-year-old American professor of international economics. I happen to be rather older, British and a professor of political science, but the name was mine. So was the photograph. But there all similarity ended. Neither the muddled meanderings nor the outrageous assertions (such as "Japan is hastening to rebuild its military strength") were anything that I could ever have uttered.
Repubblica is the newspaper of the left intelligentsia. Its director, Eugenio Scalfari, thunders from its pages with a moral authority which makes him much admired among that category of socially responsible men and women to which-most days at least-I consider myself to belong. So when I wrote to him, it was more in sorrow than in anger. This really is an outrage. Retraction please. And where are your journalistic ethics?
Within an hour of the fax arriving, not Scalfari but the offending Occorsio was on the telephone. It was his earnest wish, expressed with the deepest apologies, that a scandal might be avoided. Could we do a proper interview? One that would give me the opportunity to correct the false impression of my views? It was to Scalfari I wrote, I said, and from Scalfari that I expected a reply.
Two days later I was in Rome to give a lecture. A messenger arrived with two letters. A warm, eloquent letter from Scalfari. Naturally, he had investigated. It appears that, having failed to get me at home, Occorsio tracked me down in the US. Of course there can be misunderstandings in transatlantic conversations. Sorry that my views were misrepresented, a correction is clearly necessary. But he hopes it can be done in such a way as not to ruin a promising career. From Occorsio came another letter with the corrections he would be happy to print.
And there, at the end of the lecture was the woebegone Occorsio himself. "But you know damn well you never found me in the US. You lied to your editor and expect me to cover up for you!"
"I know. He wrote the letter after I lied to him, then I told the truth."
"Then he can write to me again now that he knows the truth."
"Why are you so intransigent?"
I wrote back to Scalfari. I cannot accept a correction that leaves the reader thinking: "Just another professor who talks off his top and then gets cold feet when he sees it in print." I demanded a simple statement. "No interview took place; the opinions expressed are those of the journalist, not of Dore."
Immediate reply from Scalfari. He was not pleased to know the truth. A cold two lines. "A correction will be issued as you desire and as spelt out in your letter." When the correction appeared the headline was fine: "No interview with Ronald Dore." The message which followed, however, was a masterpiece of ambiguity.
"Professor Ronald Dore, with whom there appeared an interview, conducted over the telephone, in the 7th February issue of the business and finance supplement, has informed us that he had no telephone contact with the journalist, Eugenio Occorsio, who conducted the interview. We naturally take note of this declaration which we can only attribute to a mistaken identity (uno scambio di persona) for which we are deeply sorry. We offer our apologies to Professor Dore."
Italians are the most practised people in Europe at deconstructing the occult texts of politicians and journalists. What would an Italian reader make of it? Three hypotheses. One: it tells the truth. Occorsio got the wrong number and by extraordinary bad luck hit on somebody prepared to sound off on Japan's rearmament intentions and the Uruguay Round. Two: tipsy professor sounds off; horrified when he sees what he has said in print; wants to backtrack; professor has powerful friends so editor has to indulge, or at least semi-indulge him. Three: lazy journalist has too much space to fill. Not sufficiently confident in own opinions. Ventriloquises. Editor covers up for him.
Surely, one would give an 80 per cent probability to hypothesis number two. In other words, this so-called rettifica is highly defamatory.
Scalfari has since retired but Occorsio's career has blossomed. I recently saw him on television explaining with great confidence, not to say brio, what Iraqi exports would do to world oil prices.
