Interview with Bill Emmott
Q: Especially in Italy, the statistical education doesn’t exist, so journalists have to do all the work. At the same time in journalism schools we don’t really study statistics. What are the consequences of this situation?
R: I think that this is a common situation in many countries because the kind of people who become journalists are very often people who’ve studied the Humanities degrees, art degrees, maybe politics. They are not mathematicians, they are not statisticians. That means that it is a good idea for journalism schools to include statistics in their courses. Secondly, I think it is a real responsibility on editors, chief editors of publications to have some kind of framework for controlling the use of data and improving it. That includes training schemes: we used to have at The Economist regular courses of how to read balance sheets and this kind of things for our journalists, particularly younger ones. Secondly, it includes setting up the system of checking; thirdly it means that from the top of the publication, the “direttore”, should show that he or she takes this very seriously and that he or she is angry when there is a mistake made or false statistics used: they have to show that it is important and I think two or three editors show that they care about it and they need to send the signal.
Q: James Fontanella-Khan underlined the fact that lot of politicians do their statements and journalists just copy them without checking them. That’s a problem that in Italy is very severe because journalism has always been strictly connected with politics. What is the difference between the Italian situation and the british one?
R: I think in Britain journalism has always been less connected to politics than in Italy. Of course we have columnists who have political views and political affiliations and newspaper editors often decide to take as view from one political party or another, but most journalist, working even for these newspapers do not see their role as political. So I think that there is a cultural and historical difference and I would hope that as the media evolves in Italy and as different generations of editors come into positions of authority they will do their best to try to reduce this political nature of their publications because it reduces the reliability and authenticity of the publication. In America there are people who watch Fox News because it tells them things they already believe for political reason. What’s the future of that publication? It is not going to survive in the new internet digital world if it does not build a reputation or some kind of reliability, some kind of independence. So I think it is a suicidal path if newspapers continue this highly political nature of their journalism.
Q: Some of the debate’s speakers have mentioned a website, factcheck.org, so the World Wide Web represents a great opportunity, but what are the risks of it? If there are any.
R: Well I think that one big risks is that you can’t get the proper resources to make these websites good enough and secondly the risk is that powerful political and corporate interests manage to influence and maybe take over this kind of operation. So it is not easy to do: it needs resources and it needs to be cleaner than clean, it needs to be pure and that is very difficult to achieve. That would be my worry if I was trying to set this up and I wish RENA (Reta per l’Eccellenza Nazionale, nda) good luck because I think that’s an excellent idea but no one should pretend that it’s easy to establish it. The tradition of big foundations like the “Annenberg Public Policy Centre” in the United States it’s such a different one from Italy: a kind of philanthropy that there is in the United States provides resources for this kind of activity that don’t exist in very many other countries. Certainly it doesn’t exist easily in Italy.
By Elena Fuzier Cayla
