The Press: Rags and Libertines

As the pro-Communist government of Portuguese Premier Vasco dos Santos Gonçalves lurched closer to collapse last week (see THE WORLD), the general paused to heap invective on an unexpected enemy. “Certain organs of the Portuguese press are today bordering on the near obscene,” Gonçalves roared at an audience in a high school gymnasium near Lisbon. “Their looseness with freedom impairs freedom of the press.” That might seem an odd complaint from a man heading a regime that has permitted Communist-dominated unions to gag nearly all of the nation’s newspapers and every television and radio station. But Portuguese readers have been getting a remarkably unvarnished version of the news from a few weeklies, one new daily and, increasingly, from uncooperative staffers on some of the nationalized dailies Gonçalves thought he controlled.

When the military overthrew the right-wing regime of Marcello Caetano on April 25,1974, Portugal’s newly freed press was unanimous in support of the new government. That admiration became dutiful, if not downright slavish, after the government last March nationalized the banks that controlled all of Lisbon’s seven dailies. A notable holdout, the Socialist República, finally fell into line following a takeover by the Communist-dominated printers’ union, backed by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. Since then, though, several newspapers have openly irritated the government by publishing contentious statements from Portugal’s rival military factions and ignoring official requests to play down the renewed strife in the Portuguese colony of Angola.

Secret Plan. Lately, some Portuguese journalists have grown even feistier. Jorno Novo, a Socialist daily founded just after nationalization by a former advertising man, earlier this month ran an exposé of what it called a secret government plan to impose censorship and fines of up to $20,000 for sins like “neglect of duty to sensitize the population to the great national tasks.” Social Communications Minister Jorge Correia Jesuino, a Gonçalves intimate, refused to discuss the scheme, but even government-controlled papers hastily denounced it. Since then, an anti-Communist slate has easily won control of the nation’s 358-member journalists’ union. Thirty of the 54 editorial staffers of the government-controlled daily Diário de Notícias have denounced the paper’s Communist line, and 17 newsmen of the state television system have demanded the resignation of Correia Jesuino.

The government and its Communist friends have not taken this independence lightly. All 30 of the Diário de Notícias rebels have been suspended. Meanwhile, Gonçalves has tried to rally public opinion by condemning unfriendly publications as “those rags and those libertines.” More ominous are reports that the government plans to cut the supply of newsprint to dissenting newspapers—and worse. “I think that there should be one morning newspaper and one afternoon newspaper,” Correia Jesuino told TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott. “We can’t afford to have so many newspapers.”

Whether Correia Jesuino will get a chance to prune Lisbon’s press, or impose a censorship plan, is another question. The seven state-owned dailies are believed to be losing both readers and revenues, while Jorno Novo has been gaining circulation, from an initial 40,000 last spring to some 100,000. Raul Rego, whose República was seized by its Communist printers, plans to launch a new Socialist paper next month, aptly named O Luta (The Struggle). By then, however, there may well be a new Premier, and many Portuguese journalists hope that covering the news will no longer be such a struggle.