During the general assembly of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party held from 14 to 17 November 1968, the following principle was confirmed: “Press, broadcast, and television are in the first place the instruments of the enforcement of party and state policy [...] When the employees of the mass media are not loyal to the fundamental interests of the state and of socialism, and to their own organisation’s policies, it is necessary to draw organisational and individual consequences.” The November resolution became the first official authorization of the “normalization” policy.

The selected section of the SÚTI fund/collection monitors the gradual adoption of this “new orientation” of individual mass media and gives concrete examples of insufficiently following the “normalization” path. The section contains the set of very detailed assessments of the articles and reports published by official mass media. By this means, the collection points out another dimension of censorship, which was aimed not only at forms of open opposition, but concentrated also on continual “purges” of mass media from the “sediments” of unsatisfactory political involvement, ignorance of certain political events, lax approach to processed topics or, in Slovak case especially, inappropriate nationalistic tendencies or excessive influence of the Catholic Church.