Between 1914 and 1945 war reporting became something governments organised. Correspondents still went to the front, but what they could see, where they could go and what they could send home were decided by censors, accreditation rules and official expectations. This guide draws on a university history of First World War correspondents, the US National Archives' description of the American Office of Censorship in the Second World War, and a Library of Congress exhibition on women who reported that war.
What newspapers expected in 1914
A study of First World War correspondents by Tim Luckhurst of the University of Kent's Centre for Journalism, written for the 1914-1918-online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, opens with the hopes of the press. At the outbreak of war, newspapers in the Allied and neutral democracies expected to give their readers vivid descriptions of the fighting.
They were soon frustrated. In the study's summary, censorship obstructed the adventurous style of war reporting to which readers had grown accustomed. The kind of independent, first-hand account associated with the Crimean correspondents, written by a civilian who went where he chose, did not fit the needs of governments fighting a total war.
Censorship and patriotic duty
The same study identifies what governments wanted from the press. Belligerent governments wanted journalists to encourage men to enlist and to maintain morale on the home front. Many newspapers in Britain, France and the United States, it says, were content to act as patriotic propagandists, and all of them were constrained by rules and circumstances.
The result, in the study's words, was coverage in which war correspondents played down misery and praised victory. That outcome had two sources that are hard to separate: external control by censors, and the willingness of editors and reporters to support their own side. A reader of wartime newspapers usually cannot tell which of the two shaped a particular sentence.
Two kinds of limit
- Imposed. Censorship, through which governments controlled what correspondents could report.
- Accepted. Newspapers and correspondents chose to support the national cause and wrote accordingly.
A legacy of distrust
The Kent study closes with the consequences. Soldiers, it says, found the behaviour of the press hard to forgive, and war reporting promoted the belief that newspapers could not be trusted to tell the truth. The same tension, between journalists who want access and independence and authorities who want control, runs through the later guides on Vietnam, the press pools of 1991 and the embedding system of 2003.
The US Office of Censorship
In the Second World War the United States created a dedicated agency. The US National Archives' guide to its records, Record Group 216, sets out the Office of Censorship's administrative history. It was established as an independent agency by Executive Order 8985 on 19 December 1941, under the authority of the First War Powers Act of 18 December 1941. Its function, in the guide's words, was to censor communications passing between the United States and any foreign country, or between foreign countries by means of transportation that touched US territory.
Planning had begun earlier. The National Archives records that censorship planning by the Joint Army and Navy Board began after the President's declaration of a national emergency in September 1939. Under the plan approved in June 1941, the Navy took responsibility for radio and cable censorship and the Army for postal and telegraph censorship, under a civilian director. Military personnel doing that work transferred to the Office of Censorship in March 1942.
The surviving records show how broad the work was. The guide lists, among other series:
- a "Day File" of the Press Division, about specific cases of press censorship from 1942 to 1944;
- short-wave watch logs of the Broadcasting Division, recording the monitoring of broadcasts by the Office of War Information, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company;
- daily and weekly censorship reports, and intelligence records that remain under seal and may not be examined without the permission of the President.
The office did not outlast the war for long. It was abolished by Executive Order 9631 of 28 September 1945, with effect from 15 November 1945. Its records, which the National Archives measures at 657 linear feet plus 4,344 rolls of microfilm, are now held for research.
Accredited correspondents
Official accreditation was one of the ways correspondents reached the war. The Library of Congress exhibition Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During World War II includes a section titled "Accredited Women Correspondents During World War II". It profiles eight women: Therese Bonney, Toni Frissell, Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, Clare Boothe Luce, Janet Flanner, Esther Bubley, Dorothea Lange and May Craig.
The Library explains that these eight were chosen because of the strength and variety of their collections at the Library of Congress, and that, like their colleagues, they followed various paths to their wartime assignments. The exhibition is a reminder that the Second World War was covered in many forms at once: print reporting, photography and radio broadcasting, on the front lines and on the home front.
From accreditation to law
Accreditation was a practical arrangement between an army and a reporter, and it also has legal weight. The Third Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949, on the treatment of prisoners of war, gives war correspondents accredited to the armed forces the right to prisoner-of-war status under its Article 4A(4), as the UN Security Council recalled in resolution 1738 (2006). The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) explains the category today: war correspondents are civilians formally authorised to accompany the armed forces, usually through an official accreditation process, and Article 4A(4) of the Third Geneva Convention entitles them to prisoner-of-war status on capture.
The ICRC adds that accreditation is not a condition of protection for journalists in general. All journalists are protected as civilians as long as they take no direct part in hostilities; accreditation matters for the specific status of war correspondent. The law page sets out the rules in full.
Reading wartime news
For anyone using newspapers, newsreels or broadcasts from the two world wars as evidence, the records described here suggest some practical cautions:
- Assume that copy from the front passed a censor, and that what is missing may matter as much as what is printed.
- Look for the official records of censorship themselves, such as the National Archives' Office of Censorship files, which document how censorship was organised and what cases it handled.
- Compare press accounts with sources that were not written for publication at the time, such as letters, diaries and later testimony.
- Remember that patriotic framing was often chosen, not only imposed, and that the same newspaper could be both censored and willing.
None of this makes wartime reporting worthless. It makes it a particular kind of source: a record of what governments and newspapers were prepared to tell the public, which is itself an important part of the history of each war.