The Press in Chain in Nazi Germany : An object lesson for pro-regime megaphone media in Fiji
By VICTOR LAL
It is beyond question that my name is, and will be eternally linked to, the Fiji SUN, the old one before the 1987 coups, and the new one which replaced it in name.
As one searches for motives of newspaper editors and publishers in post-2006 coup, I went back to a copy of The Captive Press in the Third Reich by Oron J. Hale that was published in 1964.
I had read it years ago, following the 1987 coups.
I could not resist dusting it off my shelves to take a peek into history.
Hale was an American officer who had interviewed Adolf Hitler’s publisher and Nazi press magnate Max Amann in detention in Nuremberg, in September 1947, for Amann’s role in the Nazi party conquest of the German press.
In his concluding remarks, Hale posed the question: what kind of profession and what kind of press did the system of total control produce?
For a judgment and critique we need not go outside the circle of party leaders who were intimately concerned with the daily work of the press.
William Weiss, who supported the system enthusiastically during the early years of the regime, was completely disillusioned.
He had headed the Reich Press Association,Journalists and editors became increasingly dissatisfied and resentful of the government’s policy towards the press, he said.
Likewise the monopoly gained by the party through Amann’s operations undermined the confidence of the public, although the full extent of his operation was not appreciated.
Under the strict controls established by the Reich press chief and the propaganda ministry, editors and writers were deprived of all independence and initiative, and the newspaper became simply a megaphone.
The public became uncertain and mistrustful of the press.
Moreover, Weiss pointed out, a uniform press did not serve equally well all levels of education, interest, and attainment represented in the German population.
One paper was just the same as another and all were directed at a mass segment of the public.
People became bored and suspicious and the press as a source of information and opinion lost its standing and influence.
And even Amann, when asked if he thought the party’s monopoly of newspaper published produced a good daily press, admitted that although he had given it a good economic foundation, “it was impossible to edit and publish good newspapers”.
The editors, he said, complained to him that they received a three-inch file of directives and a one-inch file of news.
“How could an editor publish a good paper when he sat with one foot in jail and the other in the editorial room?” Indeed, how could he?
Unless, you become a shameless propagandist of the dictatorial regime, cowing to censors who have spent their lives churning out third quality government press releases, and who had nothing by envy of the mainstream journalists who risked it all to tell their countrymen what had been really happening to their beloved country.
The journalists and editors who have not sold their soul to the regime should take comfort from Frankfurter Zeitung, which had been founded in 1856 but was closed down by Hitler in 1943.
While in the end the Nazi dictator was forced to commit suicide in his bunker in Berlin, the Frankfurter Zeitung was re-launched in 1946.
Its time pro-regime megaphone media editors took a leaf out of history- that dictatorial regimes will in the end die, but fearless journalism will live on.
