MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–JOURNALISM.

MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–JOURNALISM. The title of the article by the great Murray Kempton that I posted on yesterday was “A Genius of Journalism.” Kempton professed a perverse pride that Mussolini shared Kempton’s profession. Kempton pointed out that journalists made up half of Italy’s cabinet in 1930 and claimed that, “In democratic societies journalism is often a branch of government; but in Mussolini’s, government was a branch of journalism.” He quoted the historian Dennis Mack Smith that Mussolini “was probably the best popular journalist of the day” and that “he had discovered that readers liked extreme views and rarely bothered much about inconsistency.” (Many sportswriters have made the same discovery). How did Kempton feel about his fellow journalist? He said, “I should suppose that only those of us who have reveled in the guilty pleasure of employment on an especially outrageous newspaper can know the full mixture of amusement and horror at the thought of a government controlled by a mentality like its publisher’s.” The phrase “reveled in the guilty pleasure” seems to come from the heart, but with Kempton, one is never sure.