![]() ![]() It identifies the themes and topics they did report, those which they were prevented from covering, and those which they chose not to touch. It explores their relationships with soldiers and their involvement with state propaganda. This article outlines how war correspondents who were able to visit the front worked between 19. Īmerican reporter Frederick Palmer (1873-1958) observed: “There was not the freedom of the old days, but there can never be again, for the correspondent.” There was no need of censorship of our despatches. We wiped out of our minds all thought of personal scoops and all temptation to write one word which would make the task of officers and men more difficult or dangerous. We identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field. Philip Gibbs (1877-1962) of the Daily Chronicle wrote after the war: And their most magnificent flights were flights of rhetoric or pure fancy”. The British journalist Sydney Moseley (1888-1961) described it as a time when war correspondents’ “wings were so clipped by the authorities and the censors that they seldom fluttered to the front line. The war correspondent was a glamorous figure until the First World War saw this model of heroic, independent reporting severely curtailed.īetween 19, war correspondents ceased to be autonomous observers of conflict and learned to work within a set of laws and conventions that encouraged them to write pro-war propaganda. The Japanese decision to ban American correspondents from the front during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 had done little to reduce expectations. Moreover, by the end of the 19 th century, the work of pioneers such as William Howard Russell (1821-1907) of The Times and Archibald Forbes (1838-1900) of London’s Daily News had generated a tradition of bold, adventurous journalism capable of attracting readers and, occasionally, speaking truth to power. In these conflicts, professional correspondents travelling independently had eclipsed serving soldiers as sources of reporting from the front. Readers had experienced the consequences in coverage of the Crimean War (1853-1856), American Civil War (1861-1865) and Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). In the second half of the 19 th century, technologies, including the electronic telegraph and photography, had transformed the coverage of news. īritish, French and American newspaper readers in 1914 expected war reporting to be exciting and revelatory. Stephen Badsey argues that British war correspondents wrote “pen-portraits of the horrors of the trenches were on occasion so vivid that Haig was moved to complain”. An alternative view, namely that correspondents depicted grim realities as accurately as possible within the formal and informal constraints under which they operated, has recently earned attention. It is widely held that war correspondents produced an over-optimistic depiction of trench warfare between 19 and that their work distorted civilian understanding of the conflict (among the proponents of this position are Christian Delporte, Martin Farrar, Niall Ferguson, Philip Knightley and Colin Lovelace). ![]()
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