Simple Reading

“Those who defend the idea that journalism is ‘objective’ assert that a news story can relate a particular event exactly as it happened. And this is true. But the reader of a newspaper does not read ‘the news’; he reads ‘the paper’. Which is to say: he has in front of him a front page, a middle page, a last page. Will a piece of news have the same ‘objective’ value regardless of whether it is published on the front page or the final page? Newspapers use various typefaces, ranging from the very large, which is visible at a distance, to the very small, which is lost in the body of the newspaper. Sometimes, the overall look of the newspaper orients the ‘translation’ that the reader must make of the news. In Buenos Aires there is a newspaper, which usually publishes more photos of cows, bullocks, calves and bovine livestock in general, than of human beings. And in the latter category, they often have pictures of Nixon and Kissinger, and local personalities of the same ideology. An ‘objective’ news item published by the aforementioned paper, even if it had been edited by Marx, in close collaboration with Lenin, Mao and Fidel, would most certainly acquire an anti-popular meaning. The news of the struggles of workers in Córdova does not have the same meaning when read in isolation as it does if it is printed beside a photo of a cow fraternising with Nixon. The meaning changes, obviously. Thus, the first technique of Newspaper Theatre consists of reading the news item, clearly and sincerely, without comment or commentary. It consists of extracting the news story from the layout imposed by the newspaper’s proprietor and reading it out loud.

When the ex-president of Uruguay, Pacheco Areco, gave a reception in honour of the yankee ambassador, all the papers published news of the banquet. During a theatre show mounted in the Peñarol stadium, the actors of the Theatre Club of Montevideo decided to read the menu from the Areco banquet. That’s all; just to read the names (which could almost be called titles) of the dishes on the menu. During the reading of the hors d’oeuvres the audience burst out laughing. The choicest delicacies were on offer. The caviar was not just any old caviar but a caviar which is produced by a particular kind of salmon in a specific part of Russia at a particular time of year; the white wine was of a particular vintage, from a particular part of Germany, etc. When they got to the pheasants, the audience stopped laughing; by means of this laying out of the news in its reality, and not in the pages of the bourgeois papers, the audience made its own

connection with the fact that the same president had recently banned the eating of beef for four months across the whole country, to favour the export market: he had recently decreed the spectre of hunger! No-one felt like laughing at the fact that the president and his friends should be stuffing themselves with ‘Bellavista lobsters prepared with anchovies imitating dolphins pushing the carriage of the God Neptune, stuffed with fruits de mer’ or a ‘Cutlet of veal Menonville a la Marsala with duchess potatoes and clusters of watercress decorated en papillote with papier glacé’.When they started to name the desserts, the people gathered in the Peñarol stadium were no longer laughing. Here, with a simple reading of an item of news, was a graphic demonstration of the profound injustice of a class system which enslaves and reduces to hunger the majority of human beings in order to allow a few to enjoy all the pleasures. No mass discussion was necessary, no political lecture; a simple reading of Pacheco Areco’s menu was enough, once it was separated from the layout of the papers which supported the same Pacheco” – Augusto Boal