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Assault on the Press Assault on the Press is my second study on the tradition of the McCarthy Era and my fourth book. The weaving between politics and the methods of mass communication, between information and propaganda is one of the great themes in modern history. In this work I will confront the mechanisms with which Senator Joe McCarthy, one of the most skillful demagogues in history, knew how to manipulate the American press for his own benefit. Apart from the space left for publication of unpublished material relative to the Senate Sub-Committee on Un-American Activities, in which McCarthy irregularly nominated himself president, the essay distinguishes itself by the double plane of analysis of the phenomenon: historical and technical of journalism, explaining the fundamental passage between straight news and interpretative reporting , today at the base of modern journalism. What really makes the work juicy is that the relationship between McCarthy and the journalists are illustrated from within, giving a voice to the testimony of the time, from which I have recovered and translated hundreds of interviews. With a tasty - and current - preface by one of Italy's freest journalist, Marco Travaglio.
From the preface:
Herein lies the story of a politician who saw communists everywhere and drowned his country with an unprecedented witch-hunt like the plague, to the sound of violent accusations, charges, threats, blacklists and purging. Always, as is understood, in the name of "national interests". A campaign based on lies, that appeared for years as truth thanks to the systematic manipulation of information, and to a large part to the complicity of the journalistic class, to the cowardice of the security institutions that could have been able to hinder it but didn't, to the underestimation of the character on the part of almost all of the political class without.
The man was an amazing liar: he even invented a war wound (a consequence, that in reality, was from a party where he was drunk) even pinning a heroic marine's medal to his chest. But he was also a skillful constructor of his own consensus, with a meticulous study of the language of the people (...), he had an uncommon ability to take advantage of the methods of communication for his own good. Which, especially in the beginning, made it hard to doubt his accusations, for the simple reason that at the time a senator from the United States "could not lie", by definition. He was a self-propelled ipse dixit. (...)
Don't be afraid, this book doesn't speak about the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi. It speaks to the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi. Because, without even trying, it tells a very similar story: that of the America of the Senator Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy, that for at least seven years (from 1947 to 1954) was able to kidnap the first pages of newspapers and the radio headlines, and therefore the brains of millions of Americans, with his furious and lunatic "war against Reds". The same Reds that he saw nestled in politics and information, in culture and public administration, in churches and in Hollywood, in the armed forces and even in the White House.
The Reds didn't exist, but a large part of the American people
felt comfortable pretending that they existed. Because - as
Sciltian Gastaldi writes in this good, useful and precious
book - Senator Joe McCarthy knew how to embody the fears of
the average citizen at the right time in the first years of
the Cold War. Because at that time - contrary to our time
90's to the 21st century - communism really did
exist and it really did make people afraid. Even though it
didn't exist in America, it existed in the Soviet Union and
it was trying to expand itself militarily elsewhere. Those
were the years of Stalin, not Yeltsin or Putin. The years
of the Red Army, the Iron Curtain, of the infiltration of
Soviet inspired guerilla warfare in the third world, not the
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But this is the
most fascinating and current aspect of the book: the McCarthy
era as the archetype without time and space limits, that could
reproduce itself revised and corrected (although corrupt)
even in a society that has been radically changed like ours
(...).
Marco Travaglio
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