Hungry Python
“Houdini” swallowed an electric blanket
Italy is having a five-day journalists’ strike. That’s 3+2 really, since they’re folding in the Christmas holidays when they mostly wouldn’t have worked anyway.
However that is, there will be no papers for five days, so “Upper Italy” is going to do what any other self-respecting publication would do in the circumstances – we’re going to recycle old news.
The snake in the photographs above, according to the Associated Press, is a 12-foot Burmese python named “Houdini” who for some unspecified reason lives in Ketchum, Idaho. The agency reported back in July on the surgical procedure required to save the snake’s life after it swallowed an entire queen-size electric blanket – cord, control box and all, as can be seen in the pre-surgery x-ray.
“The prognosis is great,” said veterinary surgeon Karsten Fostveld after completing the two-hour operation. Since we’ve heard nothing further about the matter, we assume Houdini is now fine and back sizing up the neighbor’s dogs.
As for the journalists, they have resorted to the desperate measure of lengthening Christmas vacations after a previous strike – which consisted in the “withdrawal” of their bylines – passed almost completely unnoticed except by other journalists. In other words, in order to punish both the public and the publishers for failing to support efforts to protect their writing monopoly, Italy’s news men and women decided not to sign the articles or television segments they generate.
Probably only an Italian journalist could have expected that this would have been an effective move. It did though demonstrate quite clearly what publishers have long believed: that no-one, the public least of all, much cares whose name is on a piece of news.
One of the reasons for this faintly ridiculous negotiating tool is that the Italian journalists’ union is traditionally very badly led; and the reason for this is that it isn’t exactly a union, but rather a sort of government-sponsored cross between, say, the Teamsters and the American Medical Association.
The union properly speaking, the “FNSI,” lives in a kind of symbiosis with something called the Albo dei giornalisti – the “journalists’ register” – which was set up under Fascism to control the press. Its members – official “government approved” journalists – are supposed to have a monopoly on writing news for the print and electronic media.
They are well-paid by Italian standards, with both a pension system and health care plans that are completely separate from those available to the common Italian “man in the street.” They have access to special low-interest loans to purchase homes and, until recently, very sharp discounts on Alitalia and the State Railways. They are more or less guaranteed lifetime employment and regular pay raises, at least if their paper survives – and if it doesn’t they have excellent unemployment benefits.
They are, as a result of these perks and others, also fabulously expensive to employ. Publishers will now go to almost any lengths not to hire a journalist if they can avoid it, much preferring to work with a rapidly growing mass of freelancers, some of whom are seriously underpaid and some of whom are not.
Official journalists are a category of workers with whom politicians understandably would like to maintain a positive relationship. They are after all still responsible for the headlines, content and opinions of the mainline newspapers and television news programs. The public of course, if their daughter cannot marry one, would on the whole like to see them hung to the last ink-stained hack and cares very little indeed about helping them maintain their privileges.
The card carriers are well-protected – the Italian Parliament a couple of years ago passed a law requiring that the Directors of press offices in any part of the Public Administration be officially registered journalists as a way to absorb their increasing unemployment – but they are struggling against an economic tide which will eventually sweep them away.
Though other legislation requires that at the very least the editor of a newspaper be a registered journalist with “full political rights” – that is precisely the way it’s put – most of the newer and more rapidly growing papers have found ways to farm out as much of their content as possible.
Television news shops – there are many fewer of them – are holding on somewhat better, but even there, playing on hair-splitting between “news” and “information,” production is more and more going into the hands of centrally-coordinated freelancers. Fighting hard for the monopoly, the journalists’ union still throws an occasional snit when some television host asks too many questions of a guest and so appears to be conducting an “interview” without holding the proper union card.
The current Government thinks unions, especially journalists’ unions, are great and has been trying with no success at all to force the publishers into negotiations aimed at obligating them to hire their freelancers, or at least somehow make them as expensive to employ as “real” journalists. This does not look like happening anytime soon, and since screwing around with publishers can be dangerous too, it is not likely that really strong steps will be taken.
In the meantime of course, the world is changing. A boom in “free” advertising-driven urban dailies has ruined the local ad sales that were the preserve of traditional papers. “Classified” ads, never very big in Italy anyway, have been lost to the Internet and to specialized giveaway publications. People have even begun reading news on the Net and the big papers here, all of them, are losing circulation.
Politicians of just about any stripe would like to be able to find a way to make a law against all of this and preserve a status quo they understand, but there just doesn’t seem to be a way to do that – though efforts will certainly be made.
In the circumstances, it is probably a good thing that Italian politics fails utterly to understand what the Internet is or how it works. Beyond the usual calls to “outlaw” violence on the Net and a degree of pedophile witch-hunting, the only real parliamentary action here was a law brought out a year or two ago requiring the operators of Italian news sites to “deposit” two copies of their content twice-yearly on – specifically – a “floppy disk” at the national libraries in Rome and Florence.
Upper Italy has never heard of anyone actually doing this – or who has a site that would fit on a floppy disk, even if these were still commonly available.