Seriously, where was the editor? OK, to walk back my review, just a bit.

And let me just say that when writing a book of less than 200 pages, all future authors take note, PLEASE don't use the term 'danse macabre' more than once unless you are writing ON the medieval genre or allegory or personification of death. The minor books these greats wrote in their later years (Roth's entire Nemesis series, for example) just seem like the apathetic efforts of grumpy old men who don't know how to NOT write, but actually seem fairly uninterested in the processes now. Philip Roth with 'The Plot Against America'. Delillo seems to have hit his high mark with 'Underworld'. Isn't that what science says?' - Umberto Eco I'm not sure what it is about aging, but some of my favorite writers DeLillo, Roth, and Eco produce absolutely sh!t novellas in their later years. Suspect, always, suspect, that's the only way you get to the truth. Not only that, but the whole purpose is to overwhelm us, to keep us from understanding how everything adds up.'Suspicions never go too far. How do we process the overload? The implication is that we can't. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition, you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc - so news drowns in a great sea of information.”Īlthough Numero Zero takes place in 1992, Eco may as well be describing our current journalistic landscape of hot takes and click bait. Or this: “The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. It’s hard, in our age of media consolidation and corporate ownership, not to read that exchange without a little shiver, a little chill. he’s our majority shareholder, as they say.” “You’re saying we have to check whether or not the Commendatore is going to like each article?” a character asks Domani’s editor, an amiable hack named Simei. Indeed, news itself is not the issue rather, power is.

What Eco is saying is that it doesn’t matter, particularly, what the truth is, that this is not why people turn to news.

Umberto eco zero