The army was furious about his messages, but William Howard Russell was not to be assumed: the journalist continued to write about the war as he saw it. The struggle had turned into a madematic drama, he thought, caused by the disastrous policy of the generals. The army hit back: officers refused to talk to him and let go of his tent and threatened him: “If I were you, I would make me gone away.”
Russell persevered. He reported on the fighting – dressed in a clearly recognizable outfit – and the horrible suffering of the wounded and the sick. His work did not go unnoticed: a year after he first reported the home front about the war with his reports, the prime minister resigned, damaged by what had happened under his responsibility.
William Howard Russell, the first war correspondent, here in his self-assembled fantasy uniform. He worked during the Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Franco-German War.
Photo approximately images
This week, media asked all over the world, including NRCAttention to the fate of the journalists who work in Gaza. Almost two hundred local reporters have already died there, while the Israeli government refuses to admit independent journalists in the area. Prime Minister Netanyahu does not want to be looked at during his attempts to end the war in Gaza on his conditions.
This aversion to a free press who wants to report on a war is nothing new, as is the case of the case of Russell. This Irishman is the first war correspondent in history and did for the The Times From London report of the Crimean War against Russia (1853-1856). His articles about, among other things, the disastrous ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and the miserable circumstances including British wounded, the readers of his newspaper first showed how things really went in a war.
The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were a golden age for the newspaper press in Europe and the US. A newspaper was for every taste, and all editors understood that their readers were interested in stories about war. And so they sent journalists on the road.
In The War Correspondent As Hero and Myth Maker Books the Australian journalist Phillip Knightley the uncomfortable relationship between war reporters on the one hand and army and politics on the other. Journalists were generally only welcome at the front if they publish articles that support the armed effort: Propaganda.
A team of French journalists films advancing tsaristsiche troops during the Russian-Japanese war in 1904.
Image Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images
During the first Great War of the Industrial Age, the American Civil War (1861-1865), there were enough reporters in the US who were prepared to do so. The bond between journalists and soldiers was close. Wilham Croffut of the New York Tribune Under fire to northern soldiers, read the poetry of Byron, while a colleague gave a telegram of General Grant to President Lincoln – who rewarded him with a kiss.
The battle for Scoops was now hard. Joseph Howard van The New York Times Seinde the entire pedigree of Jesus Christ through the Telegraaf, so that his competitors could not use it.
The European journalists who had come to the conflict, including William Russell and later French Prime Minister Clemenceau, were not impressed by the work of the American colleagues. Edwin Godkin, an Irish journalist who had emigrated to the US, noted: “Their messages were what you would expect from these kinds of men – a collection of wildly roaring of guns and the Surzuis of grenades and the bravery of the men, combined with some roaring statements with whom they happened to be.”
Republican French newspapers were the first to bring the news of disastrous battles
But how did Europeans worked when it was a war of their own country? During the Franco-German war of 1870-1871, Paris had a lively journalistic climate, Aimé Dupuy writes in 1870. La Guerre, La Commune et la Presse. There were newspapers that were very nationalistic and on the hand of Emperor Napoleon III, but also publications that were Republican’s approach. They were the first to bring the news of disastrous battles against supreme Prussian armies.
That was reason for the French government to intervene, Alfred d’Aunay saw from Le Figaro. Journalists were no longer welcome in army camps. “The measures against the press here cause enormous fuss. How can people doubt our patriotism for a moment?”
Writer and Napoleon supporter Maxime du Camp was not convinced of that patriotism. “Our newspapers did not withhold anything,” he remembers later, “nothing of what they could have said, nothing of what they should have kept silent. Foreign newspapers competed with ours. It seemed as if there was a competition to reveal the French military movements.”
The time of imperialism now broke, decades in which countries such as the United Kingdom and France let their muscles roll around the world. In the British press this was welcomed by journalists such as the young Winston Churchill, who participated in numerous campaigns – armed.
There was no question of free news gathering. Reporters who wanted to honestly report reports about the atrocities during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), for example, had to do with “crushing censorship,” said Knightley. It was notorious a censor that all the pieces submitted to him aimed in the trash.
During the First World War, this Knevelen of the press continued. That was necessary, said British Prime Minister Lloyd George, because the battle was so horrible. “If people knew that, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write it and the censorship would not let the truth pass.” Because letters from soldiers were also censored, the home front remained in ignorance.
Very occasionally the work of a journalist had an impact. As in 1915, then correspondent Colonel Charles à Court Repington from The Times reported about a major attack that had failed due to a shortage of artillery lovers. This Shell Crisis brought the British government into serious political problems.
Ann Stringer, correspondent for the UPI news agency, interviews a group of American soldiers in Germany in 1945.
Photo Bettmann
Even during the Second World War, the press had to do with censorship-if not already journalists were expected to produce pure propaganda, such as in Hitler’s Germany or Stalins Soviet Union. During the subsequent decolonization wars, there was also not much room for different sounds. Jacques Madaule van Le Monde made an attempt when he wrote in 1955: “Everything is calm in Algeria. The children die without crying.”
Journalists who tried to reveal the crimes of the French army in the course of this dirty war were given the opposition, sabotage and in at least one case with torture. When Robert Lambotte van L’Humanité After a mass murder of women and children found that “the units of repression have gone crazy,” all copies of his magazine were seized and he himself banned from Algeria.
Since My Lai, the press has an eye for the dark sides of the war
Only during the war in Vietnam (1955-1975) did something like that like free news gathering, with major consequences. The omnipresent television cameras brought the war to the American citizen in full horror. It caused a similar shock when the reports from the Crimea of William Russell more than a century earlier.
It should be noted that most correspondents were initially not critical of the war itself, as well as the failing approach. They too wanted America to win. When the experienced journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1967 about the dramatic scenes she found in an orphanage and ended her piece with the sigh: “Is this an honorable way for a big nation to fight a war 8,000 miles away from his safe home country?” Is there no newspaper who wanted to post the article.
Reporter Seymour Hersh unveiled the massacre of My Lai in 1969, but did not do it with research in the US, not at the front in Vietnam.
Photo Wally McNamee/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
Only when Seymour Hersh – from the US – unveiled the MY LAI massacre in 1969, with 504 unarmed civilians being killed a year earlier, did the focus shift to this kind of crimes.
Since then, the press has an eye for the dark sides of the war. Although armies try with embedded Journalists to send the reporting, bad things usually come to light, especially since the smartphone has entered. The country or army that wants to disguise what is happening on the battlefield, so only one option remains: excluding or eliminating journalists.