The Press: The Communists' Biggest

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Headlined Rome's L'Unità 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'Unità not only reports the news but makes it as well.

Italian Communists read L'Unità for more than news. They read it to find which way the party expects them to jump. Last week L'Unità 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'Unità workers, the paper got another circulation boost from the Wilma Montesi scandal (see FOREIGN NEWS). Beamed one of L'Unità's top executives: "L'Unità is absolutely the biggest Communist newspaper outside the People's Democracies."

L'Unità 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'Unità 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'Unità works hard to cover the news.

Party Line-Up. As a result of its coverage, L'Unità 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'Unità'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'Unità's politics," said one monarchist reader, "but it is readable and clear and tells you things other papers don't."

L'Unità 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'Unità 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'Unità is forced to wait, as it did when the "doctors' plot" exploded in Moscow and L'Unità came out with the story a day after the other Italian papers.