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A review by dcossai
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
4.0
“To know what to include in a newspaper, you have, as journalists say to set the agenda. […] It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news. And if you know how to put four different news items together, then you can offer the reader a fifth.”
A manual on how to read the news masquerading as a manual on how to manipulate the news masquerading as a political thriller revolving around a conspiracy theory, Umberto Eco’s final novel, Numero Zero, published in both English and Italian a year before his death, is even more relevant today than it was five years ago. As is typical of Eco, his fiction serves as a front to showcase the ideas he raises in his non-fiction in a practical setting, in this case those about the media, a subject he addressed in several essays spanning decades.
Eco was always a visionary ahead of this time, and this book is no exception. Published more than year before Oxford Dictionaries picked “post-truth” as the word of the year for 2016, Eco’s story about a fake newspaper gives us all we need to know about understanding how the media works in the age of post-truth: how news guides us towards certain conclusions without explicitly taking a stance; how it sets the agenda and public discourse; how it controls what makes the news and what is hushed up; the economic and political interests that determine news agendas; and even ways to create stories where there are none – or fake news, before the term became part of our everyday jargon. Eco also anticipates the Trumps of today by showing us effective ways of dismissing factual accusations and maintaining falsehoods despite evidence to the contrary.
Numero Zero is a must-read in media literacy. It can easily be read in one sitting, written in a straightforward style that does not even come close to the reading difficulties posed by The Name of the Rose. Universal in relevance, Italy nonetheless never feels far away throughout the book. Its plot spans the major points of 20th-century Italian history, weaving it all together into an intriguing, if farfetched, conspiracy theory. Mussolini, the secret services, murder, terrorism, bombings, cover-ups: you can’t ask for more from a thriller.
A manual on how to read the news masquerading as a manual on how to manipulate the news masquerading as a political thriller revolving around a conspiracy theory, Umberto Eco’s final novel, Numero Zero, published in both English and Italian a year before his death, is even more relevant today than it was five years ago. As is typical of Eco, his fiction serves as a front to showcase the ideas he raises in his non-fiction in a practical setting, in this case those about the media, a subject he addressed in several essays spanning decades.
Eco was always a visionary ahead of this time, and this book is no exception. Published more than year before Oxford Dictionaries picked “post-truth” as the word of the year for 2016, Eco’s story about a fake newspaper gives us all we need to know about understanding how the media works in the age of post-truth: how news guides us towards certain conclusions without explicitly taking a stance; how it sets the agenda and public discourse; how it controls what makes the news and what is hushed up; the economic and political interests that determine news agendas; and even ways to create stories where there are none – or fake news, before the term became part of our everyday jargon. Eco also anticipates the Trumps of today by showing us effective ways of dismissing factual accusations and maintaining falsehoods despite evidence to the contrary.
Numero Zero is a must-read in media literacy. It can easily be read in one sitting, written in a straightforward style that does not even come close to the reading difficulties posed by The Name of the Rose. Universal in relevance, Italy nonetheless never feels far away throughout the book. Its plot spans the major points of 20th-century Italian history, weaving it all together into an intriguing, if farfetched, conspiracy theory. Mussolini, the secret services, murder, terrorism, bombings, cover-ups: you can’t ask for more from a thriller.