This essay is an integral part of the Dinko Tomašić collection. He also used it in his sociological research. Nowotny's account of journalism under communism criticizes the actions of the authorities which eviscerated journalism all professional criteria. Nowotny, as a former member of the counter-intelligence service, emphasized in the introduction to the essay that there were very few journalists in Yugoslavia before the war and revolution devoted to “advanced ideas” or communist ideology. As a result of emigration, and because many journalists were killed or jailed, while others were fired because of their “petit-bourgeois attitudes,” professional journalism virtually disappeared during the course of revolutionary events.

Those few remaining journalists who were even loyal to the communist government were under constant and strict control by the authorities and had to exercise self-censorship out of fear, so that in any new journalism after the revolution, any criticism of both political authority and the state was entirely excluded from society. Nowotny cited the case of cartoonist Andrija Maurović, who joined the Partisans in 1943. After the war, he refused to join the Party because of his disappointment with the regime. He personally confided to the author of this essay that he was thinking about leaving the country due to “false socialist policies.” Although Maurović propagated the Partisan communist movement very much, in the late 1940s he came under regime criticism because his artistic work demonstrated “non-socialist” tendencies.