ARTURO COLOMBO

Alberto Cavallari docente a Pavia

N. 185

Summary — Drawing in part on personal memories, the author gives an account of the world of Alberto Cavallari, who taught journalism at the University of Pavia’s Faculty of Political Science from 1984 until March this year. Cavallari was less interested in the history of journalism than in increasing the awareness and knowledge among students of the nature of the role necessarily played by "public information" in a world ever more dominated by the mass media. "Great journalism" was, in Cavallari’s view at an end. Today, we must recognize that we live in a "universe dominated by words, sound and images", including in their most negative and dangerous forms. How are we to defend our "free space "? How are we to avoid the demand for "information" being transformed into an ambiguous "deformation "? How are we to take account of the need to "know what is happening in the world" while rejecting the poison of pseudo information which, even in contemporary democracies, oppresses all civilized forms of creativity? These question remain the symbolic ethical and political legacy of a journalist who was above all an intellectual.