Selling War

The Role of the Mass Media in Hostile Conflicts from World War I to the "War on Terror"

Josef Seethaler, Josef Seethaler

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781841507835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book is the first collection of essays to explore the changing relationships between war, media, and the public from a multidisciplinary perspective and over an extended historical period. It is also the first textbook for students in this field, discussing a wide range of theoretical concepts and methodological tools for analyzing the nature of these relationships. Shedding new light on conflicts spanning from World War I through the so-called War on Terror, the contributors explore the roles of traditional media, war blogs, and eyewitness reporting; of war correspondents and embedded journalism; and of propaganda, wartime public relations, and information warfare.

PART I

'Never Such Innocence Again': Propaganda and Total War

War and the Public Sphere

European Examples from the Seven Years' War to the World War I

Reinhard Stauber

Summary

In recent times, historical research – and, most notably, the concept of Erfahrungsgeschichte (‘the history of experience’) – is acknowledging the role of the mass media in shaping the knowledge and the images of reality that are present in society. That is particularly true in times of war when the media enjoy privileged access to information. Based on the examples of four European wars between 1750 and 1918 (The Seven Years’ War, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the World War I), this chapter outlines the techniques and forms in which the media reported on war in the past few centuries. It attempts to illustrate the fact that conjuring up images of the enemy and arming the citizenry against real and presumed opponents has always been an important tool in creating in-groups while excluding ‘the others’. In the course of the nineteenth century, the notion of the ‘nation’ developed into an absolute value that could not be questioned and thus became the highest and the sole reference point for the loyalty of political associations and their leaders. It thus emerged that war and nation-building or nation-state-building were very closely associated with one another. The experience of war counts as one of the central nation-building factors in modern times, and the incorporation of the nation into the events of war would be unthinkable without the nineteenth-century mass media and their accounting of the events in words and images.

Introduction

War, as Karmasin (2007) has recently explained, is a deadly and ever-present extreme state of human existence. Not least for this reason, they are also media and communication events that have had an enormous impact since the beginning of the historical tradition (Karmasin, 2007: 11; see also Daniel, 2006a; Köppen, 2005; Knieper and Müller, 2005; Preusser, 2005; Löffelholz, 2004; Hartwig, 1999; Imhof and Schulz, 1995).

The media and communication sciences can contribute to research on the close interconnections between a media culture and war, but the historical sciences also have a part to play. Over the past ten years, the concept of Erfahrungsgeschichte (‘the history of experience’) has been extended beyond the evidence of actors, eyewitnesses and those directly affected (‘the experience of war’) to include the process of medial transmission to a wider audience (Buschmann and Carl, 2001). The mass media have a key function in shaping the knowledge that is present in society: they create images of reality that stamp experience and become particularly effective in certain contexts, especially when such media enjoy privileged access to information, as is (or seems to be) the case in times of war.

‘In modern times societies are increasingly integrated, in terms of communication, via the mass media’ (Buschmann, 2001: 102). The European wars of the 1850s and 1860s gave the role of the mass press a sudden boost and placed newspapers at the center of public communication. By 1850 at the latest, politics recognized that the press was indispensable as an instrument of political mobilization (Buschmann, 2001: 113). Thus war became a fixed component of the contemporary world of the imagination – not only as a military event but also with respect to its political, social and historical contexts. Wars and crises were not only communicative events of the first rank but also screens on to which the clash of opinions between political world images and various social views were projected.

In this chapter, I shall present four European examples between 1750 and 1918 in order to outline the techniques and forms in which the media reported on war.

The Eighteenth Century – The Seven Years’ War

Even in the eighteenth century, current political news was disseminated most quickly and widely by the daily or weekly press. The development of this medium in the context of the seventeenth-century ‘communication revolution’ can, it seems, be attributed in part to the high proportion of war-related reportage in early newspapers and to the interest of urban elites in particular in this sort of information (for an overview, see Wilke, 2005). Events of the Thirty Years’ War, such as the storming of the city of Magdeburg, which was reduced to ashes in 1631, or the conclusion of peace in 1648, were early large-scale media events with a European dimension (Schultheiss-Heinz, 2004; Wrede, 2004; Blitz, 2001).

This trend continued in the eighteenth century and was promoted by the evolving enlightened and critical public sphere. The Seven Years’ War, which was fought in a number of theaters of war in Europe and overseas between 1756 and 1763, was a major event. One of the leading German-language newspapers of the period, the Unpartheyischer Correspondent, published in Hamburg, increased its average print-run from 1,500 to more than 10,000 between 1730 and 1780.

I shall discuss some of the main features of war reporting in the eighteenth-century press by taking as an example the Austrian monarchy’s oldest newspaper, the Wiennerisches Diarium (from 1780 on renamed the Wiener Zeitung), founded in 1703 and privileged by the imperial court. The court supplied information exclusively to the Wiener Diarium, and the paper was justifiably considered the official mouthpiece of Viennese politics (Gestrich, 2006).

Usually published twice a week, the newspaper ran to eight pages in length. In times of war, however, extensive reports and supplements meant that it regularly doubled or tripled in size, news about Austria, France (its most important ally), and its main enemy, Prussia, forming the main focus of interest. ‘Detailed news about the other belligerent powers was frequently conveyed by [regular] correspondents in the respective capitals, rather than coming from the “front”’ (Gestrich, 2006: 26f). Thus, the news did not originate with war reporters in the real sense of the word. A time lag of ten to fourteen days between the occurrence of an event and it being reported on in the press was the rule.

About one-third of the reports were devoted to things that would hardly arouse interest today, such as the deployment and redeployment of troops, that is, the semipublic side of preparations for war, which could be observed on the spot with relatively little risk. There were fewer reports about armed conflicts and battles (about 15 percent), and only 3 percent of the reports concerned war crimes in the broadest sense, especially plundering and forced requisitions. It is hardly surprising that the Wiennerisches Diarium concentrated on such acts committed by Prussian troops, which points to the propaganda function of the manner in which news is selected.

The Wiener Diarium’s main sources for its war reports were the field journals and war diaries kept by the Austrian army. Written at the headquarters of operational units (and incidentally, not always by high-ranking soldiers), they were sent to the Viennese court, which passed parts of them on to the press. The journals were ‘composed in a very neutral tone, and reported a great deal about troop movements, officers’ achievements, and promotions. Battles, as a rule, were described in a distanced manner, as if from the perspective of a general watching from the top of a hill’ (Gestrich, 2006: 33). In certain cases, for example in 1760, when Prussia firebombed Dresden, a royal residence defended by the Austrians, the consequences of acts of war became visible to the civilian population. The perspective of the ordinary soldier, by contrast, was completely missing.

The Crimean War 1853–56 – The First Media War?

By the nineteenth century, newspapers were the standard medium of war reporting, and they continued to play this role. The Crimean War was the first European war that readers could find information about by reading newspaper reports filed regularly by correspondents writing from the midst of events – that is, reports from the front in the real sense, using the first-person perspective of a participant, in words or images. All the major London newspapers had at least one reporter with the troops at the front and in Constantinople – and thus the independent journalistic genre of war reporting was born (Daniel, 2006b; Knightley, 2004; Lambert and Badsey, 1994; Münkler, 1992; Royle, 1987).

The flood of different images turned the Crimean War into a spectacle of visual representation (Keller, 2007; Smith, 1978):

• In addition to the traditional battle pictures such as those commissioned, for example, by the weekly Illustrated London News (with sales of 200,000 in 1855), there were a large number of relatively inexpensive lithographs, retouched in color, and often available only after a few weeks. They included, for example, William Simpson’s iconic representation of Florence Nightingale as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’.
• In a huge panorama in Leicester Square, Londoners could experience the Battle of Alma, fought on September 20, 1854, at the end of the same year; Madame Tussaud put Florence Nightingale on display; and the battles of the siege of Sevastopol were recreated in sound and light shows.
• Photography, so far, still played a minor part in this flood of images of a distant war (Holzer, 2003a). Photographers had been present on the spot since the spring of 1855, but their products were of little interest to current reporting as there was no technical means of reproducing photographs in newspapers. Roger Fenton photographed the life of troops behind the lines, in vegetable gardens and with military bands, and he left more than 300 portraits of officers. Furthermore, James Robertson and Felice Beato documented the destroyed fortifications of Sevastopol after it was captured in September 1855 (Paul, 2004: 61–5; Keller, 2003).

In Britain, an open and highly controversial public debate accompanied the decision, taken by Aberdeen’s government at the end of 1853, to join France in granting the Ottoman Empire armed support against Russia. Other topics that attracted wide public attention were whether Britain’s preparations for war were adequate; the strategy followed by the commander-in-chief Lord Raglan, after the landing of the Black Sea expeditionary forces (approx. 30,000 strong) in 1854; the logistical problems at the theaters of war; or the sanitary conditions and especially the atrocious medical care for British soldiers. The popularity of the war against the empire of the Russian tsar, who was presented as a sort of archenemy, was stoked by all the British newspapers and served to conceal the transition to an offensive war in the summer of 1854, a step marked by the decision to besiege the fortress of Sevastopol in the Crimea. But from the turn of the year 1854–55 the leading articles in all the print media became clearly more critical of the war (‘national suicide’, according to The Times of January 25, 1855, Daniel, 2006b: 55), and Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, increasingly became a target for xenophobic journalists.

The Times occupied a special position – it had something like a public–private partnership with the government in Westminster. Strongly capitalized and peerlessly well informed about events in the capital and worldwide, it was the newspaper of choice in the City of London, where it sold up to 60,000 copies, and the most widely read newspaper worldwide for international news. In addition, during the 1850s it was something like the government’s mouthpiece vis-à-vis an unstable House of Commons, riven by special interests. As early as 1852, Henry Reeve, a Times leader writer and Privy Council official, had written to Foreign Secretary Granville: ‘This nation is a good deal enervated by a long peace, by easy habits of intercourse, by peace societies and false economy. To surmount the dangerous consequences of such a state, the Government will require the support of public opinion’ (Daniel, 2006b: 41f).

Unlike Queen Victoria, who advised against paying too much attention to journalists, the British prime ministers of the Crimean War period, Aberdeen and Palmerston, were clearly aware ‘that the times are gone when politics was able to dispense with the press’ (Daniel, 2006b: 57).

The Times’ proximity to the arcane area of politics, the information passed to it and, not least, the financial strength of its owner, John Walter III, meant that its editors were confident that as a moral authority and Europe’s conscience, they had a claim to influence politics. Indeed, they felt a moral imperative to do so: ‘A newspaper such as The Times is in the position rather to confer than receive favours, and rather to act as the umpire than the tool or the instrument of party’ (Daniel, 2006b: 55).

The Crimean War was at the beginning of William Howard Russell’s (1820–1907) career as special correspondent for The Times. Previously the paper’s parliamentary reporter, from February 1854 on he accompanied the British Expeditionary Corps for more than two years. Later he worked for the paper in India, during the American Civil War, at Königgrätz in 1866 and Sedan in 1870, and in 1879 he was in South Africa for the Daily Telegraph.

Working for The Times opened every door for Russell. In March 1861 he was received in Washington by President Lincoln, who said, ‘The London Times is one of the most significant powers in the world – I cannot think of anyone who has more power, except perhaps the Mississippi. I look forward to getting to know you as its ambassador’ (Russell, 2000: 208).

And in July 1870 Bismarck personally told the Times correspondent, who had paid him a courtesy visit in Berlin before his journey to Lorraine, ‘You will travel. I cannot give you an order; that is a matter for the War Minister. A decree has been issued that in principle press correspondents are not permitted to accompany our army. But you are an exception and will shortly receive your credentials’ (Russell, 2000: 287; see also Daniel, 2004; Atkins, 1911).

Russell and Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who reported from the front for the Daily News, unsparingly conveyed the negative conditions they found, including those on their ‘own’ side. ‘To this extent, the reputation of war reporting as a journalistic genre that informs and speaks the truth, a reputation which goes back to the Crimean War, has a core of reality’ (Daniel, 2006b: 61).

Yet for future generations of war reporters who, consciously or not, allowed themselves to be used in the service of their own ‘patriotic’ cause, this core of reality could become an expedient lie to get them through life.

The vividness and drama that characterized the reports by Russell and Godkin can be attributed to the relatively great freedom of movement that journalists enjoyed in the military theaters and depended on their individual ability in finding the right people to talk to. As a rule, reports were sent to London by post, which meant that the information had a transmission time of two to three weeks. The Crimea was not integrated into the continental telegraph system until April 1855, and even then correspondents only exceptionally telegraphed their reports because of the high costs involved (see Kaufmann, 1996).

British war reporters in the Crimean War obtained much of their information from regimental officers. These were already known to British newspapers as the authors of letters to the editor, and they were not sparing in their criticisms of the commander-in-chief Lord Raglan and his general staff. Thus a new sort of pressure was exerted on the leading generals, and politics could interfere in strategic questions with ever shorter reaction times. Raglan, 66 years old at the time and a protégé of Wellington’s, had last seen active service at Waterloo in 1815. He considered himself responsible only to his supreme commander, Queen Victoria, and was neither able nor willing to deal with these new conditions:

Instead of sending reports from the theatre of war written with an eye to capturing the attention of the reading public, he continued to file his extremely dependable but boring dispatches. Instead of receiving reporters from the front working for the big London papers in his headquarter in the Crimea, he snubbed them by ignoring them. (Daniel, 2006b:...