37.1 Theme 1 - Reporting and portraying war

The Breadth Frame

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme, so the strongest answer follows change across the full
period 1859-1991. Do not learn it as a list of media inventions. Track the relationship
between three things:

The long pattern can be summarised like this:

For remembrance and portrayal, the broad change is different. In the late nineteenth
century, many public portrayals of war still fitted older heroic, imperial, national or
martial traditions. After the First World War, mass bereavement, trench experience and
mechanised slaughter gave anti-war and disillusioned portrayals much greater force.
After the Second World War, portrayal often balanced a "necessary war" story against
evidence of bombing, genocide, trauma and veteran readjustment. Vietnam then produced a
major cycle of films, books and television in which war was remembered through moral
ambiguity, psychological damage and distrust of official explanation.

The most persuasive overall argument is therefore: technology made war reporting faster
and more immersive, while twentieth-century mass warfare made war portrayal more contested.
Neither reporting nor portrayal moved in a straight line from propaganda to truth.

Telegraph, Photography and Press

By 1859, the electric telegraph had already begun to transform journalism. It allowed
coded messages to travel by wire far faster than letters, ships or couriers. For war
reporting, this changed expectations. A newspaper could now try to report a battle,
political crisis or diplomatic development before a full narrative had been written.
The result was a new appetite for speed. War became a sequence of updates.

The US Civil War, 1861-65, was a key development because it combined mass newspaper
readership, telegraphy, railway transport, war correspondents and photography. Hundreds
of reporters covered the war for newspapers and agencies. Dispatches from the front
could be sent by telegraph, copied by newspapers and read by civilians who were still
emotionally close to the war because sons, fathers, brothers and neighbours were serving.

This was a major change from older war reporting, but it was not pure transparency.
Reports could be partial, rushed or partisan. Editors wanted speed, drama and sales.
Armies worried about military secrets. Telegraph offices and lines could be controlled,
interrupted or overloaded. A fast report could be a wrong report. The telegraph therefore
changed the tempo of public knowledge more than it guaranteed accuracy.

Photography altered public perception in a different way. The Civil War was the first
large and prolonged conflict to be extensively recorded by photography. Photographers
associated with Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan and others recorded
soldiers, camps, battlefields, hospitals, ruined landscapes and the dead. Images such as
Gardner's and O'Sullivan's battlefield photographs made war look less like a heroic
engraving and more like a physical landscape of bodies, mud, equipment and aftermath.

Yet photography had strict limits. Wet-plate cameras required heavy equipment and long
exposures, so they could not capture moving battle action. Photographs often showed the
moments before and after battle rather than battle itself. Some images were posed,
arranged or carefully framed. Photographs also circulated more slowly than telegrams,
especially before halftone reproduction made photographs easier to print in newspapers
from the late 1880s. They were powerful evidence, but they were not neutral or complete.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 shows the commercial side of late nineteenth-century
war reporting. Competition between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William
Randolph Hearst's New York Journal helped popularise what critics called yellow
journalism: large headlines, emotional stories, dramatic illustrations and sometimes
exaggeration. The Cuban rebellion against Spain, the treatment of Cuban civilians, and
the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour in February 1898 all became headline
material.

It is too simple to say that newspapers alone caused the war. US strategic interests,
Cuban nationalism, Spanish imperial weakness, American politics and the Maine crisis
all mattered. Modern historians are cautious about giving the yellow press too much
causal power. But the Spanish-American War is still crucial for this topic because it
shows that mass newspapers could intensify public emotion and create pressure for action.
The press did not just report foreign conflict; it helped make the conflict emotionally
legible to readers.

The same war also points towards the age of film. Motion pictures were new, and the war
became a popular subject. Some films showed real servicemen, ships, parades or funeral
processions; others re-enacted events. This is an important warning: from its beginnings,
filmed war blurred the line between documentation and reconstruction.

Film, Radio and Control

The First World War changed war reporting because it was a mass industrial war in
which governments became far more determined to manage information. The telegraph, cable
networks, photography and newspapers already existed, but the scale of 1914-18 made
information a matter of morale, recruitment, diplomacy and military security.

Britain, France, Germany and other belligerents all worried that uncontrolled reporting
could reveal troop movements, damage morale or help the enemy. In Britain, the Defence
of the Realm Act, the Press Bureau and military censorship limited what could be printed.
At first, British official policy made front-line reporting very difficult. Later,
accredited correspondents were allowed closer to the front, but within a managed system.
Soldiers' letters were censored, casualty reporting was delayed or controlled, and
newspapers often had to rely on official communiques. The result was a major continuity:
new technologies had made reporting faster, but total war made control more systematic.

Film was the most important new visual medium in the First World War. The key example is
The Battle of the Somme, filmed by official cinematographers Geoffrey Malins and
John McDowell in 1916 and released in Britain in August 1916 while the battle was still
going on. It was seen by millions of people and became one of the most important films
in British cinema history. Audiences went partly because they hoped to glimpse relatives
or see what the Western Front looked like.

The film was powerful because it seemed to let civilians witness war directly. It showed
artillery preparation, marching troops, wounded men and the dead. This challenged older
sanitised images of war. Some viewers were shocked by seeing bodies in a cinema, a space
usually associated with entertainment. The film helped fix the Somme in British visual
memory.

But the film also shows the problem of authenticity. Some famous "over the top" shots
were staged behind the lines because the cameras were too cumbersome and dangerous to
use for that moment in a real assault. The film was therefore both documentary evidence
and patriotic construction. It showed real suffering, but it also presented the offensive
as purposeful and successful enough to sustain morale.

Radio developed its greatest wartime importance in the Second World War. Radio did
not show images, but it carried voice, tone, silence, sirens, speeches and live description
into homes. Edward R. Murrow's London broadcasts during the Blitz showed how radio could
make listeners feel that they were hearing war as it happened. Governments also used
radio for morale and propaganda: speeches by leaders, BBC news, enemy broadcasts such as
Lord Haw-Haw, and American Office of War Information broadcasts all made sound part of
the struggle.

Radio changed the emotional geography of war. A civilian listener in London, New York or
Manchester could feel connected to events far away, but the medium also depended heavily
on trust. A broadcaster's voice could create authority. A government station could frame
events as courage, endurance, atrocity, victory or betrayal. Radio made war intimate,
but not automatically open.

The filming of the Second World War went much further than in 1914-18. Camera
technology had become more portable, and official film and photographic units recorded
campaigns in every theatre. British Army Film and Photographic Unit cameramen went in
with assault troops on D-Day in June 1944. American military and newsreel cameramen also
recorded training, combat, home-front production and liberation. Newsreels, documentaries
and official films gave civilians a moving-image war on a scale impossible in 1916.

Again, the judgement must be balanced. Second World War film created a huge archive of
evidence, including images that later became central to public memory, such as liberation
footage from concentration camps. But wartime film was also edited, censored and
distributed for particular purposes. It could inform, motivate and prove, but also
select, simplify and persuade.

The turning point by 1945 was therefore not that people saw the whole reality of war.
It was that film and radio made war a mass media experience. Civilians could hear leaders,
follow campaigns, watch official images and imagine distant fronts as part of their own
daily lives.

Television and Satellites

Television changed war reporting because it combined moving image, sound, regular news
bulletins and domestic viewing. The Vietnam War is often called the first television
war. That phrase is useful, but it needs careful explanation.

By the mid-1960s, television had become central to American public life. After large-scale
US combat forces entered Vietnam in 1965, network coverage expanded sharply. By 1968,
there were hundreds of accredited journalists in Vietnam working for wire services,
newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Reporters often had greater access than in
the world wars. The US military did not impose the same kind of formal censorship used
in 1914-18 or 1939-45, though access still depended on military transport, official
briefings and where reporters could safely go.

The television effect is often overstated. Film from Vietnam was usually shot, flown out,
developed, edited and then broadcast; most nightly news did not show live combat as it
happened. Many reports were conventional summaries read by anchors. Yet television still
mattered because the war became a repeated visual presence in American homes: helicopters,
villages, body bags, burning buildings, wounded civilians, tired soldiers and official
briefings. The gap between official optimism and visible confusion became politically
important.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 was the crucial example. On 30-31 January 1968, North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks across South Vietnam during
the Tet holiday. Militarily, US and South Vietnamese forces eventually repelled the
attacks, and communist forces suffered heavy losses. Politically and psychologically,
however, Tet damaged confidence because it contradicted claims that victory was close.
Images and reports from Saigon, Hue and the attack on the US Embassy compound suggested
that the enemy could still strike at the centre of American power in South Vietnam.