From the earliest days of the republic, American leaders encountered difficulties trying to balance the need for secrecy in diplomatic and military affairs with America's tradition of a free and independent press. As early as 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to President George Washington that “No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free, no one ever will.” Yet, only three years earlier, Congress passed a statute requiring each department to establish regulations for the custody, use, and preservation of official documents. That seemingly innocuous statute implicitly included rules for classification and censorship. The imposition of such rules has been especially important during periods of international crisis and war when citizens have been asked by presidents, who controlled the flow of government information, to surrender their lives and treasure to defend national security. Looking over America's military past, many observers would agree with Senator Hiram Johnson (R‐Calif.) who said in 1917 that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
Obviously, few citizens in any nation approve the publication in wartime of information about troop movements and military strategies that would help their enemies defeat their fighting men and women. Not all citizens agree about the necessity of government suppression or censorship of journalists or those opposed to war who allegedly give aid and comfort to the enemy by criticizing presidents or generals or organizing antiwar groups.
This was the case with the first major assault against free speech and the free press in the United States, the Federalists' controversial Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to write or speak against the president or Congress in a defamatory way during the
Because of the development of high‐speed printing presses in the 1840s, the “penny press” could be produced rapidly and cheaply in large numbers. Newspapers like the New York Morning News and the New York Herald competed with one another for jingoistic readers and thus contributed to the spirit of “manifest destiny”—a slogan coined by the Morning News's John L. O'sullivan—that swept over the nation.
The development of the telegraph and other improvements in land and sea transportation soon made it easier to bring news from afar to major urban areas. Nonetheless, because telegraph lines did not reach south of Richmond during the 1840s, it still took as much as three weeks or more for news from Mexico to arrive in Washington and New York, via New Orleans and the sea. All the same, the war in Mexico was the best‐covered war to date as journalists like the dashing George V. Kendall did not have to put up with censorship and often fought in battle alongside the men about whom they were writing.
For the emerging profession of war correspondent, the war was just a warmup for the Crimean War and the Civil War, where modern problems of censorship on the battlefield first appeared. At the start of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln placed the telegraph lines in Washington under federal control, but allowed journalists free rein elsewhere. Because of major divisions in the North, the policy changed in February 1862 when Lincoln took control of all telegraph lines and ordered the U.S. Postmaster General to deny the use of mail service to disloyal newspapers. Operating under that order, Lincoln's agents completely suppressed several Democratic newspapers and imprisoned editors.
Northern newspapers and illustrated magazines sent 500 correspondents and a few illustrators into the field, almost all of whom supported the Union cause. The same could be said for their 100 Southern counterparts, most of whom did double duty in the Confederate army. Due to self‐censorship as well as official censorship, reporters underestimated casualties and reported uncritically about strategic and tactical blunders. This was the first American war in which the media played an important role in intelligence. Despite the censorship, both Robert E. Lee and William Tecumseh Sherman, among other generals, claimed to have discovered valuable information about troop movements and future battle plans from newspapers.
The public's demand for war news proved insatiable. The more colorful and breathless the story, the more newspapers were sold. As in later wars, reporters sometimes made up “eyewitness” accounts of battles hundreds of miles from their positions. In 1864, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton began issuing daily war bulletins, a practice that made it easier for journalists to write their reports and easier for Washington to control the news.
The press played a more important role prior to the next war, the Spanish‐American War, than during it. From the beginning of the Cuban insurrection against Spain in 1895, the new sensationalist “yellow press,” exemplified by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, increased circulation exponentially as it called for American intervention against the Spanish, who were accused of committing some real and many imagined crimes against humanity. On the other hand, as the United States prepared to enter the war, President William McKinley masterfully manipulated the news so that skeptics would ultimately support his call to arms.
The U.S. government centralized the release of war information from Washington, took control of telegraph facilities at Key West, Florida, and censored dispatches that arrived in New York City. Nonetheless, embarrassing stories did manage to leak out concerning gross mismanagement and scandals in the food and supply lines. Two hundred correspondents, including the novelist Stephen Crane and the flamboyant Richard Harding Davis, covered the Caribbean campaign, while fledgling motion picture companies made reenacted newsreels they sold as authentic to a public thrilled with this “splendid little war.”
Military censorship in Manila posed greater difficulties for journalists covering the less popular follow‐up Philippine War against Filipino insurrectionists. But material did appear in the press that highlighted torture and atrocities committed by American soldiers in a dirty, counterrevolutionary war and encouraged a potent anti‐imperialist movement.
After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the War Department, following the policies of the European nations, established its first formal accrediting procedure for war correspondents. A journalist had to agree in writing to submit dispatches to military censors and to behave “like a gentleman of the press.” In addition, back in Washington, Woodrow Wilson established the controversial Committee on Public Information, which was not only in charge of censorship but also ran an elaborate propaganda campaign at home and abroad. For example, the committee employed 75,000 speakers who delivered 750,000 four‐minute pep talks, often in movie theaters, in 5,000 cities and towns in support of the war.
The administration also obtained from Congress the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I. The former permitted the Postmaster General to refuse to mail magazines or other publications detrimental to the war effort; the latter prohibited speech that did not support that effort. Under such laws, Socialist Party presidential nominee Eugene V. Debs was sent to jail, as was a movie producer for making a film about the Revolutionary War in which the British appeared as villains.
During World War II, military authorities again imposed strict censorship at the source for correspondents who numbered as many as 1,000 in Europe alone. Among other matters deemed threatening to national security were stories and, especially, pictures that portrayed too graphically G.I. injuries and death, or reported incidents of cowardice, as was the case during the Battle of the Bulge, or revealed information embarrassing to the United States and its Allies. And as in previous wars, once they learned the rules, correspondents practiced self‐censorship so that they would not have to rewrite their articles completely after censors got through with them.
Back home, the government issued a voluntary code of wartime practices for the media, to which, in most cases, the mainstream press adhered. The Chicago Tribune was a notable exception when it revealed mobilization plans on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later ran a story about the breaking of Japanese codes. Although the Office of Censorship did intercept and read letters and cablegrams and tap phone calls, most Americans accepted the abridgment of their First Amendment rights during the global crisis.
The Office of War Information (OWI), headed by radio commentator Elmer Davis, coordinated propaganda activities. Somewhat more sophisticated than the Creel Committee of World War I, OWI staffers met regularly with the media, including the heads of Hollywood studios, to suggest political themes they wanted to promote.
No such elaborate activities were needed during the limited Korean War. From June through December 1950, journalists at the front adhered to a voluntary code of self‐censorship. But when South Korean leaders began complaining about articles critical of their repressive actions, Washington imposed full military censorship. Few Americans ever learned the truth about the nature of their ally or of the devastating American bombing of civilians in North Korea that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Such was not the case in the Vietnam War—the most controversial war in American history in many ways, including the relationship between the media and the military. According to critics of press performance, journalists in the combat theater, not subject to censorship, wrote stories and shot television footage that distorted and hurt the war effort—most controversially, media coverage of the Tet Offensive of early 1968. That charge dramatically influenced the way the government subsequently limited journalists' access during the 1983 U.S. intervention in Grenada, the 1989 Panama intervention, and, above all, the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
But the charge that the media “lost the war” in Vietnam was a myth. Except for a brief period during the Kennedy administration when several young journalists who supported the war criticized military tactics and the venality of the Saigon regime, most of the coverage favored administration policies, at least until 1968. Even during that earlier period, the government in Saigon expelled American journalists, and Washington influenced publishers to alter their coverage. To be sure, in several celebrated cases—notably Morley Safer's 1965 account on CBS of Marines burning hooches, and his later coverage of the Tet Offensive—the media apparently contributed to the growth of antiwar sentiments, but no more so than the American rates of casualties. But the fact that reporters shared the national Cold War consensus and that the tenets of so‐called objective journalism demanded that they report official briefings (the “Five O’clock Follies”), often uncritically, guaranteed a relatively favorable press until almost the end. The Johnson administration did not institute full censorship because it wanted to play down the importance of this undeclared war.
Another view suggests that the Vietnam War was the first televised live or “living‐room war.” But it was not projected live into viewers' homes. In this era before the development of satellite hookup, the news film for stories emanating either from Saigon or Japan was flown by air to New York, then edited and broadcast. As in World War II, those in charge of deciding what to air generally eliminated pictures of bloodied soldiers and the other worst horrors of war.
The situation was different during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, with strict censorship and “pool” reporting for the more than 1,000 journalists who covered the fighting in real time—primarily from hotels in Saudi Arabia. Military authorities banned several magazines from the combat theater and arrested at least eight American correspondents for violating aspects of the censorship rules. Aside from reports from the Cable News Network's (CNN) Peter Arnett in Baghdad, which were themselves censored by the Iraqis, most of what Americans saw on television was exactly what the military wanted Americans—and anyone else tuning in—to see.
Beginning in the 1980s, worldwide television news services, led by CNN, began to play an increasingly important role in crises and wars. Before the Gulf War broke out, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, was encouraged by strong congressional opposition to President George Bush's policies, broadcast by satellite to Iraq. Later, coalition commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf tailored his televised briefings for those in Baghdad who were watching. In 1991, Haitian dictator Gen. Raoul Cédras's viewing of congressional and other opposition to American policies, brought to him by the ubiquitous CNN, may have contributed to his recalcitrance.
As nations become even more completely electronically connected to one another in years to come, the problems inherent in maintaining a free press during times of international crisis may become even more severe.
[See also Intelligence, Military and Political; Panama, U.S. Military Involvement in; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government.]
Bibliography
- Joseph J. Mathews, Reporting the Wars, 1957.
- John Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times, 1964.
- Doris A. Graber, Public Opinion, the President, and Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies from the Formative Years, 1968.
- Philip Knightly, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, 1975.
- Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945, 1975.
- Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, 1980.
- Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam, 1986.
- Robert E. Denton Jr., ed., The Media and the Persian Gulf War, 1993.
- Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War, 1993
