The Communists' Biggest

Headlined Rome's L'Unit`a last week:

TOMORROW CITY BUS AND TRAM LINES WILL BE STRUCK FROM 9 TO 11 AND FROM 3 TO 5. The strike, led by a Communist-controlled union, occurred as predicted, to no one's surprise. For, as the biggest (est. circ. 500,000) and most powerful Communist newspaper published in the free world, L'Unit`a not only reports the news but makes it as well.

Italian Communists read L'Unit`a for more than news. They read it to find which way the party expects them to jump. Last week L'Unit`a itself was jumping for joy. After winding up its 30th anniversary celebration, including circulation-building, mass meetings addressed by party brass and "medals of honor" for widows and children of devoted L'Unit`a workers, the paper got another circulation boost from the Wilma Montesi scandal (see FOREIGN NEWS). Beamed one of L'Unit`a's top executives: "L'Unit`a is absolutely the biggest Communist newspaper outside the People's Democracies."

L'Unit`a is not only big by Communist standards. In Italy, where exact newspaper circulation figures are a closely guarded secret, it is one of the biggest journalistic operations. Its central Rome edition is connected by its own wire to offices in Milan, Turin and Genoa, where separate editions are put out. Its staff of eight editors, 115 reporters and rewritemen and eight foreign correspondents is supplemented by 2,875 party members, who act as part-time volunteer correspondents, in almost every town in Italy. L'Unit`a prints 27 subeditions with local news for every region where it is sold. Thus, unlike other Communist papers in the West (e.g., Manhattan's amateurish Daily Worker, San Francisco's People's World), L'Unit`a works hard to cover the news.

Party Line-Up. As a result of its coverage, L'Unit`a attracts non-Communists along with Communist readers. Many a non-Communist buys the paper simply for its news and its full coverage of scandals, crime, sports and entertainment, and swallows a thick coating of propaganda with the news. For example, L'Unit`a's elaborate coverage of the Wilma Montesi scandal last week was angled to fit in with the party's battle against the government. "I don't like L'Unit`a's politics," said one monarchist reader, "but it is readable and clear and tells you things other papers don't."

L'Unit`a makes no secret of its Communist ties. Periodically, on Page One, it prints such instructions to party members as: "All Communist Senators without exception are required to be present at tomorrow's session." When the party line is not clear, L'Unit`a has a simple way of finding out what it is. The editors call on Italy's Communist Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti, once editor of the paper and still its ultimate authority as well as its biggest shareholder. When Togliatti himself has not yet had the word from Moscow L'Unit`a is forced to wait, as it did when the "doctors' plot" exploded in Moscow and L'Unit`a came out with the story a day after the other Italian papers.

Thanks to its party backing, L'Unit`a does not have to worry about circulation promotion. Every year the party declares a "press month," holds thousands of L'Unit`a parades and mass meetings all over Italy. Tens of thousands of volunteers sell the paper the year round as their part-time service to the party, and in a high-powered campaign, every top Communist from Togliatti down screams promotion speeches from public platforms.

Government Presses. L'Unit`a's all-Communist staff is bossed by committees, but two of its top men are Editor Ottavio Pastore, 66, who started out as editor of the paper when it was founded in 1924 and now also holds a seat in the Italian Senate, and Amerigo Terenzi, 45, chief executive officer, promotion and business manager, whose office is filled with the same circulation pie charts and graphs that adorn the walls of any other publisher. Present devotion to the party rather than past political history is a first requisite for a job, e.g., Milan Editor Davide Lajolo was a topflight Fascist newsman who fought on the side of Mussolini's Blackshirts in Spain before returning to Communism. The staff is paid well below the minimum for Italy's non-Communist newsmen, although L'Unit`a led the campaign for the minimum newspaper wage on Italian papers.

The paper's success is partly due to government tolerance. Two years after the paper started, the Fascists drove it underground. It did not come out in the open again until 1944 when, on the day after the Allies entered Rome, the Communists seized mastery of one of the city's biggest printing plants and put out 150,000 copies of the paper. Though the government soon took legal control of the plant, L'Unit`a has been allowed to rent the presses ever since. If it wanted to, the government could make things tougher for L'Unit`a by refusing to let it use the presses. But the government has shown no signs of doing so, even though the paper makes plain where its allegiance lies.

"Moscow," says the paper, "is a great center of political, artistic and economic life; the wisest statesmen, most responsible exponents of economic organization and most open-minded scholars all turn to Moscow." So does L'Unit`a.

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