Another episode on the extraordinary documents on the history of Cremona from the declassified files of the American Command in Italy in 1945. This time we talk about how newspaper censorship worked. All those who wrote had to be registered. And every newspaper had to be authorized to print. Even the Eco del Popolo directed by Emilio Zanoni needed the “print”. The search is of Marco Bragazzi.
“What can I do if you’ve had our newspaper confiscated twice!” Franco Simonini takes it out on his editorial colleague Silvio Magnozzi; It’s a difficult life that of the film starring Alberto Sordi alias Magnozzi, a difficult life that of journalists at the time of the Allied Government, “A difficult life” is the title of the film directed by Dino Risi.
In the late spring of 1945 in Cremona a press that was not only linked to the previous twenty years was breathing again; the newspapers begin to appear again in good shape on newsstands and in homes but, despite the years of forced apnea, the Allied Government in the city immediately began to put obstacles in the way of information. The reborn free access to publications was not so free after all, the local press was, according to the Allied Government, one of the fixed points on which no deviations were allowed; the Allies decided and the journalists wrote, a change outside the rules was not allowed, the invasiveness of the military in the printed press was clear and evident. In order to be published a newspaper had to pass under the Caudine forks, the right to information was based, especially for the local press, on the filing of every single worker linked to a periodical. From the director, through to the typographers, to the photographers up to the secretaries, strict rules applied, in practice all those who wrote or worked in an editorial office had to be registered, according to the logic of being able to immediately identify any persons responsible for articles, or images, which were not in keeping with the dictates desired by the Government. Excluded, for reasons of age, were the so-called “blondies”, kids who, for a few pennies, ran into an editorial office or around the city with tissues in their hands to start an article or inform the printer. The initial filter, from May 1945, of every new adventure in the world of publishing was represented by a request, which did not provide exceptions, linked to the publication of a newspaper.
Also Emilio Zanoni, future mayor of Cremona, had to submit the regular form, with the cards of each employee attached, to be able to return to offering the weekly “Eco del Popolo”, the press organ of the Italian Socialist Party, on newsstands. But for all periodicals, whether they were linked to a party or not, this rule was valid: the presentation sheet had to also contain the home address of all those responsible, because the journalists had to be available in case of problems with their articles . Just to avoid any misunderstandings, as if filing alone wasn’t enough and despite having made every single detail clear, the kilograms of paper intended for printing the periodical also had to appear on the editorial request. The paper method was a very simple one, and like all simple things it proved to be extremely effective, to make the most of a form of control; each printed copy had a specific weight, so the total weight of a print run was easily calculable, if paper consumption increased too much there were two possibilities, either a periodical had been produced without authorization or the paper had been sold on the black market. In any case the newspaper would have become acquainted with the process of suspending publications; fires, floods or problems with the printing machines were, very cunningly, not foreseen given that the requests for printing paper still had to pass through the Government offices. The primary need of the bureaucrats was clear, it was to have a clear vision of the contents and the people who had created them, a direct way to manage information and, according to their logic, public opinion. In a sort of paranoid, and perhaps overestimated, power of the communication tools the Allies had transferred the concept of war propaganda even after the war was over, the authorizations linked to the local press had to be authorized both by the General Command of Rome and by the local one of Cremona because Obviously, the soldiers stationed in Cremona had a much clearer vision of the Cremonese than even that of some officers in Rome. The city of Cremona, in May 1945, was regaining its spaces, both from a building and social point of view, a plurality of information offers was the basis for finding that breath that had been denied for decades, a breath that however was still managed from a more reductive rather than open perspective. Silvio Magnozzi and his articles had experienced, first-hand, what the Allied Government had defined as Proclamation No. 3, in practice a law, if we can call it that, which gave the Allies the right to intervene in any periodical by blocking its diffusion or , even putting it into print, with consequences that could range from editorial suspension to the arrest of the director and his collaborators. Silvio Magnozzi worked for a Roman newspaper but, in 1945, even in Cremona some newspapers were blocked for articles that were not exactly in line with the dictates wanted by the provisional government. A difficult life for sure, otherwise it wouldn’t be real press or real information.
