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The French war ministry established a bureau to censor military information on 3 August. From the first minutes of the war, Germany imposed rigid and efficient military censorship and allowed no newspaper correspondents to visit the front. The press law of gave the government power to suspend press freedom during war and the government did not hesitate to use it. Serving soldiers working as officer correspondents supplied meticulously censored material from the frontlines. But despite these initiatives, censorship was not immediately effective.
In the first weeks of fighting, a few intrepid correspondents were able to move freely and, by living as outlaws, to report without constraint. They produced some of the most memorable reportage of the First World War. Among these examples of journalism from are three reports, which depicted the real consequences of modern warfare: His report, published on 30 August , revealed shocking news: The pursuit was immediate, relentless; unresting… regiments were grievously injured Our losses are very great. Three weeks later, Albert Londres of the Parisian title Le Matin , a similarly intrepid correspondent, cycled into the northern French city of Reims under intense bombardment by German artillery.
They saw the destruction of its ancient cathedral. Cobb of the Saturday Evening Post, a mass circulation weekly news magazine published in Indianapolis, got his first scoop of the war in occupied Belgium. German newspaper readers did not read such material. However, for readers in America , Britain and France there were, in these early chaotic months of mobile warfare, several additional examples of resourceful eyewitness reporting that conveyed a sincere and accurate impression of the fighting and its consequences.
Separated from their officers, retreating soldiers recounted their experiences and correspondents reported them faithfully. Civilian refugees shared their horrors, hopes and fears. Wandering on the fringes of the action and smuggling their stories back to Britain via couriers based in the port of Calais, British journalists including Phillip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, William Beach Thomas of the Daily Mail and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the Daily Telegraph were able to find compelling and detailed human-interest stories.
This they did at grave personal risk. The enemy was advancing and the frontlines were not yet stable. Correspondents caught in civilian clothes risked being shot as spies. Several were arrested on charges of espionage. Moreover, despite the risks taken to obtain them, their stories were subject to censorship at home. In late October, Philip Gibbs crossed back into Belgium from France and filed a series of compelling eyewitness reports about the fighting between Nieuport and Dixmude in West Flanders.
It was the type of candour the British and French governments believed they must suppress. Unrestricted, it might threaten the supply of young lives required to sustain warfare in the age of mechanized slaughter. Ernest Dunlop Swinton was a full colonel in the Royal Engineers.
Correspondents caught in civilian clothes risked being shot as spies. Just click the link below. A shell had just fallen on the cathedral square I essayed to tell as much of the truth as was compatible with safety, to guard against depression and pessimism, and to check unjustified optimism which might lead to a relaxation of effort. The General commanding the 42d tells me that it was the toughest and pluckiest bit of fighting that any part of the division had done. War correspondents downplayed misery and extolled victory.
Philip Gibbs was arrested at Le Havre and warned that he would be shot if he returned to France. Tom Quinn notes that: The American neutrals fared a little better. Several, including Irvin Cobb and Richard Harding Davis , doyen of the American war correspondents, chose to go home rather than submit to the indignities of censorship.
Among these, William G. Shepherd of the United Press was particularly successful. He broke exclusive stories including the first German use of poison gas on the Western Front at Ypres in April and the first Zeppelin raid on London in September Knightley notes that Shepherd learned fast how best to squeeze his words past the censors. Exploitation for propaganda purposes of American war correspondents was a tactic employed on both sides of the Western Front.
Their draconian press laws did not prevent the German military offering help and support to journalists whom they believed might help influence American domestic opinion in their favour. Britain and Germany had been major trading partners before Each felt the loss of such a convenient export market and sought to replace lost business with new, transatlantic trade. Early in , the British and French governments confronted a dilemma. They had stopped free movement of correspondents on the Western Front and imposed effective censorship.
However, in so doing they had angered Americans by restricting access to coverage of the fighting. In the first months of the war, American readers had grown accustomed to detailed, colorful and balanced reporting. Objectivity was already an established principle of American news reporting. In , American correspondents had applied their principle to challenge reports of German atrocities in Belgium. Now the shortage of reporting about the British and French armies risked giving German propaganda undue prominence by default. The French were first to devise a solution intended to satisfy domestic and overseas demand.
In February , they introduced a system of accredited correspondents. In May , the British government decided to imitate the French model: It was the birth of a process by which blunt censorship would be replaced by a subtler system in which newspaper power was manipulated to serve government interests.
All billeted together in a house in the village of Tatinghem adjacent to St Omer, they were supplied with army servants, army vehicles and dedicated conducting officers. Censors accompanied them at all times. Formally, they were allowed to go wherever they liked and to report whatever took their interest, provided only that their work did not break the rules of censorship.
In fact, they could go nowhere unless accompanied by their conducting officers and censors. Every word they wrote was read by these mobile censors who also checked to ensure that they were concealing no private messages by means of invisible ink. The War Office forwarded the dispatches to the relevant newspapers and agencies.
The army had bowed reluctantly to political pressure to admit reporters. It had no intention of allowing them to write accurate first drafts of history, still less to hold power to account. America entered the war in April , mere months after President Woodrow Wilson had won re-election in a tight contest against his Republican opponent, Charles E. Wilson had a propaganda battle to fight. To win it he established and funded generously a Committee on Public Information.
Its objective was to generate intense popular animosity towards Germany. These efforts to sway American opinion created intense anti-German sentiment.
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Nevertheless, as Ferguson explains, the Wilson administration remained concerned about the extent of patriotism in an American population of million citizens, which included 8 million first or second generation Germans and So strict was the new legislation that more than 2, Americans were prosecuted for sedition and nearly served prison sentences of up to twenty years.
Knightley explains that the conditions under which they worked were still more restrictive than those imposed on the British correspondents. Among the most alarming innovations in battlefield technology deployed during the First World War was the use of lethal gases including phosgene and chlorine. This was the first occasion on which German forces fired chlorine gas. The Times correspondent wrote:.
Acknowledging that losses had been heavy, the correspondent concluded: The formal demands of military censorship are instantly apparent. The correspondent did not identify regiments or soldiers. He gave no estimate of casualty figures. These rules obeyed, he acknowledged deaths and wounds, but offered no description of the effects on human bodies of the artillery shells, hand grenades and bullets with which Hill 60 was bombarded.
He did not quote a single soldier. The words were his not theirs. He spoke on their behalf but without their consent. It told only as much of the truth as was compatible with the maintenance of support for war on the home front. It took great care to avoid provoking depression and pessimism. It was sufficiently honest about the death toll to limit optimism and maintain effort. If the preparations to which they had submitted before departure had not driven the point home, correspondents accompanying the American Expeditionary Forces AEF soon learned the extent to which military censorship was designed to make their work operate as a propaganda tool.
Some resented it intensely, not least because there was much to write about. They also observed the atrocious conditions in which the men were forced to live: As the weather turned cold and rainy, pneumonia deaths were rising. With their work censored to prevent readers learning about such evidence of inadequate supplies and incompetent distribution, some of the more assertive American correspondents formed a protest group, the American War Publicity League in France.
Through it, they petitioned General John J. Pershing for better access to information and reduced censorship. Now the correspondents accompanying them understood what was expected of them. This constituted a major challenge. The only extended campaign American soldiers fought as an independent force during the First World War was the Meuse-Argonne offensive launched in late September By this time, AEF commanders had taken some steps to help correspondents.
An information officer, Captain Arthur E. Hartzell , was appointed to gather and distribute news to correspondents behind the lines. Men with newspaper experience were identified among new consignments of troops arriving in France and these soldiers were given rudimentary training as press officers. The army was not abandoning control of information, but it was preparing to make a little more available to reporters. Here, the reporters were offered an unprecedented treat: Standing before a map, Major General Fox Connor explained that the operation was aimed at a crucial part of the German defensive line.
If the AEF could seize it, their assault would end the war! During the first days of the attack, motorcycle couriers and army signalers brought a steady stream of reports to Bar-le-Duc, providing a basic but useful service. One immediate consequence was that correspondents found it easier to work from their headquarters than by travelling to the front — where chaos and confusion appeared to reign. In Bar-le-Duc, they learned essential details about the shape and progress of the advance.
The material lacked elements required for compelling war reportage such as vivid eyewitness testimony and engaging quotes from combatants, but it allowed the correspondents to fill columns for their employers. Then the advance stopped. Hastily mobilized and poorly led, they suffered a disproportionately heavy toll of dead and wounded. The most telling example of tactical naivety emerged when a force of about soldiers from the 77 th Division were cut off and surrounded in the Argonne Forest by a superior German force. Reported as a glorious tale of heroism in the face of daunting opposition, it won extensive coverage in newspapers across the United States.
Crozier recalls that the correspondents told how: Copy filed by Edwin L. James , the New York Times correspondent who accompanied the AEF during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, suggests that he considered it his duty to obscure evidence of military incompetence. James did not explore why the Lost Battalion had fallen into a trap. He noted only that: Their food and ammunition ran out. Recent scholarship indicates that more than half of those trapped were killed. Edwin James was not the first war correspondent to compile a flawed first draft because those who authorized his presence told him lies, nor was he alone.
That the doughboys were suffering appalling casualties they did not deny, but their deaths were invariably heroic, their suffering always worthwhile and the German casualties always worse. The military press team were delighted with the results. Far from holding them to account, the journalists had relayed their partial and self-glorifying account of events. They did a good American piece of work A modus operandi had been reached. James was highly regarded. He ended his career as managing editor of the New York Times and is credited with helping to build its reputation as a quality, liberal newspaper with an international reputation for fine reporting.
He would complain bitterly about secrecy and censorship in the coverage of the Paris Peace Conference of A powerful reluctance to offend the soldiers they worked alongside, sensitivity to public opinion on the home front and obedience to the editorial policies of their newspapers appear to have been instinctive among correspondents accompanying armies on the Western Front. Self-censorship added to official pressure to depict the war as noble. Correspondents did not describe the maimed, shell-shocked wreckage of humanity that staggered from each engagement.
They depicted ordinary soldiers as fearless, idealistic martial enthusiasts. Philip Gibbs made no secret of the extent to which correspondents chose to offer a selective account of the fighting. As previously noted, he freely admitted that they were their own censors. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up or fought. These accounts suggest that war correspondents were not impotent prisoners of their military hosts and newspaper employers.
Rather they had agency [54] and could, had they wished to do so, have included detail, which they chose to omit.
There are good reasons to doubt it. They read of the victories; the cost is concealed. The prime minister told Scott:. Some correspondents on the Western Front and elsewhere circumnavigated military censorship and the editorial policies of their newspapers by sending detailed accounts of the horrors of war to politicians and other prominent public figures in London, Paris and Washington.
Some of these missives, sent as private letters , evaded mail censorship and reached their intended recipients. In playing this role, mildly dissident correspondents behaved as useful channels between pillars of the political and social establishments. They ran few risks of stimulating political opposition to the war. They did not want to. Such criticism as they were prepared to express was intended to enhance the Allied war effort, not to challenge its legitimacy.
Every democracy acknowledges that national security demands secrecy about the operational aspects of military activity. The British and French governments recognized early in the First World War - and the Americans as soon as they entered the fray in April — that such limited control would not meet their needs.