The Theory of the Social Practice of Information

Francesco Fattorello, Maria Way

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137542854
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Fattorello addresses the differences between contingent and non-contingent information. The theory is translated into English for the first time and is contextualized and put into a historical framework by Prof. Ragnetti's additional text.

Part I

Biography of Francesco Fattorello

Abstract: Part I of the book offers an introduction to the theory, with a translation of the foreword of the second Italian edition of the book by Giuseppe Ragnetti; a copy of the letter sent by Fattorello’s widow to Ragnetti on the occasion of the publication of the second edition; an overview of Fattorello’s life and work; and a postscript on Fattorello and Italian journalism studies in the Fascist era.

Keywords: Fascism; Fattorello; Italian journalism history; Italy; Journalism Studies; Ragnetti

Way, Maria. The Theory of the Social Practice of Information. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137542854.0006.

Beginnings in literary criticism

Fattorello was born in Pordenone in Northeastern Italy on 22 February 1902. In his early years the family moved around the Friuli due to his father’s work as an elementary school teacher. Fattorello undertook his Liceo (High School) studies at the Liceo ‘G. Berchet’ in Milan. He then moved to Florence, and once he had received his degree returned to Udine, where he began to work as a journalist, writing articles on literary criticism in various local newspapers, such as La Patria del Friuli (The Motherland of the Friuli) and Il Giornale di Udine (The Udine Journal), under the pseudonym Giorgio Werret. He also published some pamphlets and gave lectures, which demonstrated his passion and strong interest in classical culture. In these first experiences in literary criticism he was already beginning to outline some of the characteristic elements of his thought formation, which would be found later and in greater depth in all of his works.

In 1923, he founded the Rivista Letteraria delle Tre Venezie (The Tri-Veneto Literary Review), a bimonthly journal of Italian literature, with the intent of realising the mission of the bourgeois intellectuals of the time: that of re-evaluating the classical authors of the Italian literary tradition, not only to constitute a source of civilisation, but also to be ‘intellectually, morally and scientifically useful’.¹

In this same period, while giving very successful literary lectures at the Università Popolare di Udine and the Accademia Olimpica at Vicenza, he was also in charge of writing profiles of the poets and writers of the 19th century for the publisher Libreria Carducci. Both in his publications (essays on Tommaso Grossi, Massimo D’Azeglio, Ippolito Nievo, Antonio Fogazzaro) and in the lectures he gave for various institutions and academic organisations in the early 1920s, Fattorello confirmed the fundamental concepts of his vision: seeking ideal content and moral and religious intent in their works; defining art as the means through which to elevate the soul; identifying the patriotic aspects of romanticism, and so on.

His studies of local authors fitted especially well into this thread of patriotism, as he tried to trace amongst them those who showed patriotic ideals, or those who, overcoming the confines of regional production, had also made a significant contribution to national literature.

In his essay ‘Uno scrittore dimenticato: Giovanni Ruffini’ (A Forgotten Writer: Giovanni Ruffini), which was published in 1925, it is important to note how, while based on the same topics (national literature, patriotic literature) we can already see a concept that was used as the basis of Fattorello’s future studies of journalism: the language of a people is not simply a system by means of which people with the same language communicate, but it is, above all, the verbal expression of the thought, of the mentality, of the way of reasoning, that they have in common.

Notwithstanding his degree in law, completed at the end of 1924, his interests were firmly tied to literature and to related studies of Friulian culture and its relationships with regional and national productions, in regard to which he also wrote for the journal I Libri del Giorno (Books of the Day) and collaborated on other publications, such as Corriere Padano (The Padano Courier), the Gazetta di Venezia (The Venice Gazette) and Il Popolo Toscano (The Tuscan People).

The history of journalism

At the beginning of 1929, Fattorello was asked to teach a course on the History of Italian Journalism, which was made up of eight lessons and would be given at the Università degli Studi Economici e Commerciali di Trieste (The University for Economic and Commercial Studies, Trieste) in the academic year 1928–29.² Francesco Fattorello was chosen because he had continued his studies in the history of journalism,³ still a very new discipline that was being offered for the first time in university programmes. As a consequence, Fattorello had to face a whole series of doubts about the compass of the teaching of his lessons, to the systematic and organic path of the course, organising the lessons by time period, starting at the beginning. The point from which Fattorello started this and its principle, in which he firmly believed, was that the history of journalism constituted a discipline of its own, close to the historiographical sciences, and to continue to confuse it with literary subjects was a methodological error.

He continued with his research through the Rivista Letteraria delle Tre Venezie – which was published under this title until early 1927, and then became the Rivista Letteraria in 1929. Besides editing writers’ profiles, reviews and bibliographical contributions, he published historical studies and, above all, had specific space dedicated to journalism. These contributions became a precious font of material for later research on the history of Italian journalism, and a rich source of useful indications of the trends in Fascist journalism.

In Fattorello’s lessons, which were held contemporaneously in Trieste, he continued in his research and outlined the characteristics that are peculiar to the journalistic phenomenon and that increasingly distinguished it from literature. Going back through the centuries to examine the means of information, he concluded that the history of journalism is, above all, the history of public opinion and its different manifestations, rather than the story of the newspaper itself. Because of his ideas, Fattorello was criticised by almost all the other scholars of the time, including Benedetto Croce, who held that the history of Italian political journalism was born only when the freedom of the press was obtained from the Jacobin Republic at the end of the 18th century and thereafter.

Luigi Piccioni followed the same critical line, judging that if one goes too far back in time when searching for the origins of journalism (which for Fattorello coincided with those of ideas and political doctrines), one risks confusing the history of journalism with the history of culture itself.

Rodolfo Mosca, while agreeing that the history of journalism, as Fattorello suggested, did not coincide with the history of the newspaper, did not accept the idea of seeking elements of history in the journals of antiquity. For Mosca, establishing a relationship between the press and public opinion did not define the characteristics of journalism, which are timeliness and topicality.⁴

For Antonio Panella, the term ‘newspaper’ had to refer exclusively to the modern newspaper, because one cannot go back any further than the last two or three centuries in tracing their origins. In fact, it was only when journalism became literature that it realised its mission through the spreading of ideas. In this, he refers to Orano who, in an article ‘Verso una dottrina storica del giornalismo’ (Towards a Historical Doctrine of Journalism), starts journalism’s story from the end of the 18th century, when the newspaper became an important element in public life,⁵ singling out its principal functions as those of control and criticism.

The same idea was taken up by Fattorello when he insisted on the ties between journalism and public opinion, but these differ in respect to the beginning of the history of journalism, because journalism and the newspaper are considered to be two very different things.⁶

The differences between Orano and Fattorello, who held in common the idea that public opinion is the starting point for the history of journalism, result from the different cultural formations of the two scholars: for the first, an expert in the social psychology of the relationship between the press and public opinion, journalism can become the object of study from the point where it becomes the mirror of the ‘psychological aspects of modern society’, and consequently, since the principles of the French Revolution contrasted the press and political powers, until the Fascist regime brought journalism into the state’s service.

Instead, for Fattorello, the history of journalism is based on the analysis of all of the expressions of public opinion from its first and oldest manifestations.⁷ It is important that we highlight this innovative concept since it already has within it the nucleus of the draft of the theory of information to which Fattorello dedicated himself after the Second World War.

From the history of journalism to the science of journalism

In the early 1930s, while the Rivista Letteraria continued to enlarge the space it dedicated to journalism, becoming a periodical that reviewed the history of journalism with attention, Fattorello addressed his studies towards exalting the political functions of journalism in Italian history, choosing to treat with and publish specific moments and topics in journalism.

In fact, from 1931, in his essay on Pacifico Valussi,⁸ the Friulian journalist who participated in the events of the Risorgimento,⁹ who Fattorello painted as a national bard because he had brought Italy’s international role to light, but also, and above all, as a brave journalist, because he had theorised the mission of journalism in society and had underlined the need for a journalism that was free from cliques and that was at the nation’s service.

Fattorello’s other interesting contributions in this regard were born from his studies of the 18th century, important, according to him, for their formation of a national consciousness, and particularly in his essay: ‘Il giornalismo veneziano nel ‘700’ (Venetian Journalism in the 18th Century), in which, starting from the periodical Minerva and the Giornale dei letterati d’Italia (Journal of the Literati of Italy), Fattorello exalted the ‘notes of Italian-ness’¹⁰ in Venetian journalism, expanding his research to political journals, foreign papers and the Gazetta Veneta (The Venetian Gazette) and Osservatore (The Observer).

The importance of his research activity and the success of his publications, above all in the Rivista Letteraria, and his acquaintances in the local intelligentsia brought to Fattorello a type of notoriety and the prestigious task of collaborating on the Enciclopaedia italiana. At the Giornale he edited a section called ‘The Origins of Journalism’, which he wrote with Giulio Natali, taking up again his theory, in which the term ‘journalism’ included all of the expressions of public opinion – which went well beyond the actual newspaper – and spoke of the slow and continual development of newspapers, rather than of a pure invention that happened at a given moment and in a certain country. He gave particular attention to the 18th-century press and the Jacobin Republics, the period in which political journalism started, and to the press of the Risorgimento.

Finally, in the academic year 1934–35, Fattorello gave his first course on the history of journalism as a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science at the Royal University of Rome. In his inaugural lecture – published in the Rivista Letteraria and then republished in a book dedicated to a bibliography on journalism – he spoke about the history of journalism, giving special attention to its political function in the press of the Risorgimento, linking it to Mazzini’s educational thought and to the transformations of the previous decade, when the modernisation of the journalism industry and the spread of cinema and radio had given life to a modern system of communication for the greater public, in Italy as elsewhere.

His research on journalism during these years was increasingly directed to singling out and extrapolating the mechanisms of the functioning of information and propaganda and, in the teaching area, starting from the second academic year when the elective course became part of the official teaching, he subdivided the lessons into two parts: one for a particular historic period, the other dedicated to the doctrine and science of j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I Biography of Francesco Fattorello
• Postscript: Fattorello and Italian Studies of Journalism in the Context of Fascism and Nazi Germany
• Part II The Theory of the Social Practice of Information
• Part III Fattorello for Today
• References
• Index