Abstract
We shouldn't blame reporters for such limited coverage of the First World War, explains a professor of journalism
A century on from the start of the First World War, the actions of Britain's reporters, editors and publishers are easier to condemn than to understand. The catalogue of journalistic misdeeds is a matter of record: the willingness to publish propaganda as fact, the apparently tame acceptance of censorship and the failure to hold power to account.
This sweeping condemnation of the press coverage is, however, unjust. Apart from the fact that such charges have been levelled at newspapers over their reporting of every subsequent war, it requires a nuanced analysis of context and content. Journalists, as ever, were prevented from informing the public by three powerful forces – the government, the military and their proprietors.
Before we consider censorship, in which editors could argue that they were prevented from telling the truth, it is undeniable that they were less able to justify some of the uncensored material they did publish with tacit government encouragement. In an effort to demonise the German enemy, atrocity propaganda was common newspaper fare. Fabricated stories of German barbarism were accepted as fact. Innocent civilians were reported to have been murdered in all manner of grisly ways, women were said to have been raped before being killed and babies were allegedly tortured on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm.
It was, and is, accepted that Belgian and French citizens were executed as reprisals by the German army in the early months of the war. But other outlandish claims that appeared in both British and French papers were wholly untrue. They included the public raping of 20 Belgian girls; the tying of nuns to church bells; and the bayoneting of a two-year-old child. The most popular of all was a story that German factories were boiling down the corpses of their own soldiers to distil glycerine for munitions. Post-war commissions of inquiry found it impossible to corroborate any of the atrocity stories and some, such as the corpse-boiling tale, were discovered to be inventions. The U.S. journalist Walter Lippmann, citing one faked story, accused the French of grossly misleading the American people.
Editors, with support from jingoistic publishers, had been eager recipients of unverifiable salacious atrocity propaganda that undoubtedly fed anti-German and pro-war opinion in Britain (and, as Lippmann realised, in the U.S.). In journalistic terms, they were therefore guilty as charged. Censorship was a different matter. It was imposed from the opening of hostilities and, although reluctantly relaxed at various moments, it remained sufficiently strict to constrain reporters from obtaining information or, should they manage to get it, from publishing it. The overarching story is one of rigid government control exercised in company with a complicit group of committed pro-war press proprietors.
Silencing the critics
One piece of legislation, the Defence of the Realm Act, which was enacted four days after the outbreak of war, gave the authorities power to stifle any criticism of the war effort. One of its regulations stated: “No person shall by word of mouth or in writing spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of His Majesty's forces or among the civilian population.” Its desired aim was to prevent the publication of anything that could be interpreted as undermining the morale of the British people, but it cannot be said to have stifled all negative reporting.
If it had done so, then Lord Northcliffe could not have campaigned so relentlessly against Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, through his newspapers, The Times and Daily Mail. It was The Times’s war correspondent, Charles à Court Repington, who broke the story in May 1915 about the shortage of artillery ammunition on the frontline. At a time when war correspondents were banned from France, Repington was able to visit the front because of his friendship with the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French. That friendship was also the reason he got his report past the censor. What became known as “the shells crisis” had explosive political results. It forced prime minister Herbert Asquith to form a coalition government, catapulted David Lloyd George into the post of munitions minister, thereby undermining Kitchener's status, and proved to be the precursor to Lloyd George replacing Asquith.
Incidentally, Northcliffe's campaign against Kitchener, a national hero who was held in high public regard, resulted in a revolt by a million Mail readers and several advertisers. He was quoted as saying at the time: “I mean to tell the people the truth and I don't care what it costs.” He was vindicated once that truth emerged; sales and advertising returned.
Northcliffe was aware of having two advantages in being critical of the war effort. First, his patriotism was never in question because, in the years leading up to the war, his papers had published often hysterical anti-German propaganda. Second, he was assured of support from Lloyd George, with whom he connived to oust Asquith. But Northcliffe was far from the only newspaper proprietor who supported the war. C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, was initially opposed to the war, as was his senior staff. After hostilities began, however, they felt compelled to offer the paper's support. “Once in it,” wrote Scott, “the whole future of our nation is at stake and we have no choice but do the utmost we can to secure success.”
At the outbreak of war, Kitchener banned reporters from the front. He first appointed a colonel to write reports, which Kitchener then vetted before they were sent to newspapers. Later, a major who had formerly been a Daily News journalist was made official war correspondent. Two determined and enterprising correspondents, the Daily Mail's Basil Clarke and the Daily Chronicle's Philip Gibbs, risked Kitchener's wrath by defying the ban and risked their lives while acting as “journalistic outlaws” to report from the frontline. Gibbs was arrested and sent back to England, warned that if he was caught again he would be shot. Clarke, after reporting on the devastation in Ypres following the German bombardment, returned home after being given a similar warning. By contrast, Germany, which was eager to win over the neutral U.S., began by treating American correspondents quite well. In January 1915, former American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to warn that Kitchener's press policy was harming the British cause in the U.S.
Three months later, the government relented by allowing “accredited reporters” access to the front. Five men were chosen: Gibbs (for the Daily Chronicle and Daily Telegraph); Percival Philips (Daily Express and Morning Post); William Beach Thomas (Daily Mail and Daily Mirror); Henry Perry Robinson (The Times and Daily News) and Herbert Russell (Reuters). They and their newspapers agreed to have their copy censored by a poacher-turned-gamekeeper: C.E. Montague, the former leader writer of the Manchester Guardian, who was, wrote Gibbs, “extremely courteous”.
But Montague was not enamoured with “the average war correspondent” and contended that the soldiers disliked their articles. He wrote: “Through his despatches there ran a brisk implication that the regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than ‘going over the top’, that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic, that a fight never went on long enough for the men, that their only fear was lest the war should end this side of the Rhine. This tone roused the fighting troops to fury against the writers. This, the men reflected, in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.”
The bloodiest defeat went largely unreported
Over the following three years several other journalists, such as John Buchan, Valentine Williams, Hamilton Fyfe and Henry Nevinson, were given accreditation. Censorship ensured that all sorts of facts were hidden from the readers of British newspapers. British blunders went unreported, as did German victories. Even the bloodiest defeat in British history, at the Somme in 1916, in which 600,000 Allied troops were killed, went largely unreported. The battle's disastrous first day was reported as a victory. Later, Beach Thomas admitted that he was “deeply ashamed” of what he had written, adding: “The vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one's own name did not lessen the shame.” Gibbs defended his actions by claiming that he was attempting to “spare the feelings of men and women who have sons and husbands fighting in France”. The truth was reported about the Somme, he had the gall to write, “apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts”.
After the war, Gibbs accepted a knighthood for his services to journalism, as did Russell, Perry Robinson and Beach Thomas. Others, like Fyfe and Nevinson, refused. Fyfe, previously editor of the Daily Mirror and later editor of the Daily Herald, regarded the honour as a bribe to keep quiet about the inefficiency and corruption he had witnessed during the war. Only later did the public learn of the high casualty toll and the horrific nature of trench warfare, such as the use of poison gas and the effects of shell shock.
With these appalling conditions in mind, it was no wonder that Lloyd George confided in December 1917 to Scott: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know.” The PM was speaking after listening to Philip Gibbs's description, at a private meeting, of the reality on the western front. He continued: “The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business.”
Lloyd George had been sufficiently concerned about sagging public morale to have encouraged the creation of the National War Aims Committee, a semi-official parliamentary organisation set up with cross-party support in the summer of 1917. The use of propaganda in “an organised, scientific manner” was aimed at rousing patriotism. About the same time, Lloyd George sought to bring Northcliffe into government by offering him a chance to join the cabinet. He refused that post but accepted an appointment as director for propaganda for the Ministry of Information. Britain's most influential media tycoon had became the war's official propagandist. His first initiative was to organise an airdrop of four million leaflets into enemy territories.
An effective and inventive propagandist
Then Lloyd George extended his press control by appointing the newly ennobled Daily Express and London Evening Standard owner, Lord Beaverbrook, as the first minister of information, responsible for propaganda in the Allied and neutral countries. In his few months in office Beaverbrook also proved to be an effective and inventive propagandist by employing the nation's first war artists, first war photographers and first makers of war films.
The PM, as he knew well, was the beneficiary of this close relationship with press proprietors. Aside from the censor's control over what the public were being told, it offered Lloyd George a private reporting service. As Northcliffe explained to his Daily Mail correspondent, Hamilton Fyfe: “Every article that is received from you is submitted to me; but the censor kills an immense amount of matter. The articles from you [that] are killed I put before important members of the cabinet, either verbally or in your writing, so that nothing is wasted.” Lloyd George was therefore getting insights that his military chiefs might either conceal or not even know themselves.
Towards the end of the war, the facilities provided for journalists on the western front in France were different from those at the beginning. Fyfe wrote in 1917: “What a contrast I found there – in the comfortable chateau allotted to the correspondents, in the officers placed at their service, in the powerful cars at their disposal – to the conditions prevailing in the early months of the war! Then we were hunted, threatened, abused.
“Now everything possible was done to make our work interesting and easy – easy, that is, as far as permits and information and transport were concerned. No scrounging for food: we had a lavishly provided mess. No sleeping in hay or the bare floors of empty houses: our bedrooms were furnished with taste as well as every convenience … we each had a servant, who brought in a tin tub and filled it after he had brought early morning tea.”
The downside, he noted, was “in cutting us off from the life of the troops”. To overcome that, he got permission to “stay in the trenches with a friend commanding a battalion of the Rifle Brigade. No correspondent, I learned, had done this. They knew only from hearsay how life in the front line went on.”
Fyfe stood out from the crowd. Gibbs, by contrast, was one of the crowd and was candid enough to admit it: “We identified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the field. We wiped out of our minds all thought of personal scoops and all temptation to write one word which would make the task of officers and men more difficult or dangerous. There was no need of censorship of our despatches. We were our own censors.”