Fog of War by Bourrie Mark

Author:Bourrie, Mark [Bourrie, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781553659501
Goodreads: 16072325
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2012-02-21T07:08:40+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Censoring News from the Front Lines

ON JANUARY 14, 1944, Globe and Mail war correspondent Ralph Allen sat down at his typewriter and began a column that, back in Europe, would not have made it past the censors. Allen had covered the Canadian campaigns in Sicily and the Italian mainland. Less than six months later, he would go ashore with the Canadian army at Juno Beach on D-Day. Back in Canada to see his family and to check in with his publisher, George McCullagh, Allen took the opportunity to launch a sneak attack on the censors who handled the copy of Canada’s small colony of war correspondents.

Material written by reporters who were attached to Canada’s fighting forces was vetted by military censors on the battlefield and at the Allies’ chief headquarters in London. Reporters like Allen found the military censors to be arbitrary, illogical, and more concerned with the reputation of Allied generals than with the truth. In his January 15 column, Allen described the ways the army spoon-fed war correspondents with press releases and communiqués that were parroted back as news copy. The stories, in turn, were censored on the spot by army and navy officers before going out on the wires under the bylines of people who were being paid to cover the war.

But the reporters at army headquarters got something that resembled a complete picture of the military situation, even if it was doled out by army officers and filtered by military censors. The closer a reporter got to the fighting, the more confused the picture became. Modern warfare had created giant battlefields that were far too big for one person or even a team of journalists to begin to understand. Someone covering the Battle of Waterloo from the British side could, if able to make things out through the clouds of smoke, watch the day’s action from the high ground at the north end of the field, understand the importance of each of the major moves of the armies on the battlefield, and send a report that night with a fairly accurate description of the fighting. Almost fifty years later, a reporter at Gettysburg would have needed three days to see the battle. The field was larger and there was no vantage point that would have provided a view of all the fighting, but a hard-working correspondent could probably piece together the entire story by using personal observations and by talking to some foot soldiers and officers. By the time of World War One, the battles lasted too long, the field was too large, the reach of weapons was too great, and the fighting too intense for any eyewitness to understand what was happening unless they were taken in hand by military officers who had the benefit of the reports that moved up the chain of command. This didn’t happen.

In the previous century, the military had grasped the power of the press. Journalists had embarrassed the British government during the Crimean War, but for the little

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.