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own pretensions and just as often relied on improvisation (Galassi 2008). It
has also been argued that the term propaganda should no longer be used as
an analytical concept, since as a source term it suggests a one-sided wielding
of influence and thus masks communicative interactions (Mühlenfeld 2009:
528).
The media in dictatorships like those of Germany, Italy and Spain took a
different development in the 1930s and consequently are discussed separately
here. However, the outbreak of the Second World War changed the media in
many other Western countries, too. Like during the First World War, the role
of governmental influence, propaganda and censorship increased.
Press and Fascist Dictatorships
If one first regards the initial phase of Western dictatorships in the light of
media history, several smooth transitions become apparent. Even in Germany,
where political restructuring has been particularly rapid and radical since
1933, a number of developments had already begun in the years before. For
example the nationalisation and politicisation of radio started in 1932, and
the crisis in the Liberal press was around 1930, together with the nationalistic
changes that took place in the management structures of many companies. For
example, Hans Fritsche, head of the broadcasting department and the most
important radio commentator in the Third Reich, had become editor-in-chief
of the radio news agency in 1932. In the same way all three Fascist dictator-
ships in Italy, Spain and Germany allowed the temporary continuation of the
bourgeois press when they had first come into power, albeit under control. The
concomitant continuity of personnel among bourgeois journalists who were
not ostracised either as ‘Marxists’ or Jews (in Germany) underscores a high
degree of self-adaptation (cf. Lorenzen 1978: 180; Frei and Schmitz 1999:
22–26; Galassi 2008: 204).
Nevertheless the year 1933 marked an important turning point in German
media policy. This applied particularly to the banning of the ‘leftist’ press. In
Germany, two hundred SPD newspapers and thirty-five KPD journals fell
victim to this ban and were barely able to survive in exile (Danker et al. 2003:
116–30). The papers of the big Jewish publishers, most prominently Ullstein
and Mosse, kept their names after being forcibly sold, in order to imply con-
tinuity. Similarly the 1926 assassination attempts on Mussolini gave Italy an
excuse to forbid the anti-Fascist press, and Spain silenced it as from 1939.
There were hardly any legal regulations for the censorship practised in all
these regimes. On the whole they relied less on daily blue-pencilling than
on pre-selection of journalists by professional associations. Italy had already
introduced them in 1926; and in Germany, the Reichskulturkammer (Reich