Narration of Dariush Homayun about press censorship

"Most of the warnings that were given to us were the warnings that the Shah gave to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister told the Minister of Information and the Minister of Information or directly to us.
Or so his press secretary told us
And the king read the newspapers very carefully every day and followed the articles that he thought were unpleasant, and I will tell you one thing.

I had a colleague in Ayandag newspaper named Mr. Jahangir Behrouz, who wrote an article on one occasion, for example, suppose now, first anniversary of Ayandag...

For example, the first anniversary of the posterity, he wrote an article and in that article, he mentioned that this newspaper is a liberal newspaper.

Mr. Hoveyda called me personally this time because Shah was very angry about this article and Mr. Behrooz had to leave Ayandangan newspaper, and that was the reason why Mr. Behrooz left Ayandangan newspaper, this was in 1946.

In 1948, I wrote an article about the White Revolution, which at that time was called the Revolution of the Shah and the People.

In that article, I wrote that this program is not a revolutionary program, it is a reform program, and some of its articles have not been implemented yet, and if it was implemented, it was a simple administrative decision.

For example, suppose selling the shares of state factories to pay the landowners, this cannot be a revolutionary article.
This charter is not well regulated.

One was a criticism of the charter of the so-called Shah and Nation Revolution; And Mr. Hoveyda called me again and told him that the king was very angry and you should not go to the posterity, but they said that you can still write the article for the posterity.

I didn't go to Aindigan for another five weeks, even though I was the manager of Aindigan and I solved things over the phone, and I still wrote several open articles until they finally went and mediated and I returned to Aindigan.

The Shah interfered a lot in the work of the press and I have countless examples.

There were different stages in this situation. Since the year I started the so-called writing work in information, there were periods when the officers of the military government with the Ministry of Information or SAVAK, depending on which of these officials were in charge at that time, came and prepared the pages for printing the newspaper. They would look and delete those parts that they did not agree with.

Although the newspaper sometimes came with a blank section or they came before it reached that stage and we made changes that could be manipulated before printing the summary of the newspaper.

But these times were very few.
There were several cases, each of which did not last more than a week, four days, two weeks or three days.
There were many other times when the editors were obliged to call the relevant authority, whether it was Savak or the Ministry of Information, before giving the order to print the newspaper.

Later, gradually, the Ministry of Information became the exclusive center of this work.
They would read it to them and if there was no objection, they would print the newspaper.
In most of these years, the usual method was that they would call the Ministry of Information and tell the editor what they wanted to be published or not, and the editor would consult with them about the material that he felt was so-called bad, and they would consult with the responsible authorities. They consulted and asked whether it should be printed or not or how it should be printed.

Censorship was carried out in this way; And then they read the newspaper and the next control was done on the contents of the printed newspaper, which sometimes the work was lost.
A minister would lose his job.

That article that caused Mr. Jahangir Behrooz to leave Ayandag also caused the then Minister of Information to be removed and another one to take his place, because the Minister of Information at the time had also helped Ayandag newspaper a lot...
But there were other cases where several authors were left out.

They were purged from the newspaper because they had written articles.
Of course, they all returned to the newspaper after one, two, two or three months, and only they became heroes, and the enemy of the regime increased, and this was the result.

There were countless cases where other content should have been written to compensate for the content that was written.
I myself had written dozens of articles, I had to write another article to correct it.

Because the king was very angry, and to tell the truth, maybe half of the problems we had with the government came directly from the king himself, and the other part from the prime minister..."