ITALY: Censorship Bared

George Seldes, onetime Chicago Daily News correspondent in Italy, ousted by Premier Benito Mussolini for reporting Fascist violence, denounced by the Fascist press as a “fat swine,” last week did a little denouncing in Harper’s Magazine.

Scoring the Fascist régime for reducing the Italian press to utter subservience to Dictator Mussolini (almost all Italian newspapers may be called semi-official), Mr. Seldes went on to tell how foreign correspondents, under threats of expulsion, effective because they are feared, are bullied by the censorship.

Despatches written in Italy must be passed by the censor, who deletes offending matter, garbles it, inserts propaganda or refuses to pass the despatch for transmission. Stories sent through the mails, which cannot very well be censored, although letters are frequently opened, are clipped by Italian consuls in all parts of the world and are sent to Rome, where a correspondent, on a complaint from the Foreign Office, may be warned by his Ambassador or may receive a stormy visit from peppery Baron Valentino, head of the Press Bureau.

But Signor Mussolini, for all his wiliness, cannot prevent U. S. reporters from telling part of the truth, according to Mr. Seldes. “The cleverest and most effective means of obtaining the news is ‘relay reportings,'” said he, adding that the New York World has used the relay system with great success. “Apparently three representatives of this paper were at the Matteotti trial [TIME, April 5, 1926] in relays, and could, by going to Nice or Lugano, report the brutal Fascization of justice at Chieti. Readers of almost all the papers of the whole world got only a distorted, censored, almost totally untrue report of this trial, which, if reported faithfully, might have undermined the Mussolini regime and certainly would have changed the sentiment of many people toward Fascism. Only one paper was able to report the truth. The other newspapermen simply broke their hearts and kept quiet.”

Mr. Seldes also told how two U. S. consuls were set upon and soundly “beaten up” by infuriated Fascist mobs. Naturally, such a breach of the proprieties caused a good deal of commotion, and the affair was finally ended with an official apology from Premier Mussolini. However, the foreign correspondents were asked “to pass over” “this unfortunate affair” and the news was never allowed to get out of the country.

Concluded Mr. Seldes: “Every newspaper representative in Italy, including perhaps the Fascist Italians still employed by American agencies and newspapers, could supplement these cases with scores just as important, many of them unknown to most of the Italian people.”