History of the Media

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Monday June 12, 2006 22:10 by Liam Mullen - freelance Journalist

When the American Civil War (1861-65) broke out, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was galvanised and plunged 40 reporters into the fray with instructions to bring back the news first. Some editors went along themselves – notably Henry Raymond of The New York Times. The London Times had already despatched William Russell – an Irish war correspondent – who had already sent in reports from a previous conflict. Reports from the Crimean War included his byline.1

The press had learned the value of plunging was correspondents into the fray by the example set by the New Orleans press – particularly The Picayune –which had successfully despatched correspondents to cover the Mexican War of 1846, and which had been brought to a head by the US annexation of Texas in 1845 and the expansionist policies of President James K. Polk.2
His declaration of war “produced highly partisan reactions from the nation’s press. Whig editor Horace Greeley…in the New York Times: ‘People of the United States. Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity!” However Walt Whitman, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle retorted: “Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand!”2
The language of the day was different back then, and photography was only in its infancy. Posters called for men to rally to arms, and Lew Wallace who later wrote Ben Hur raised a company of men in two days.2
In contrast the Vietnam War, The Pentagon Papers and Watergate a century later were events still reported by newspapers but a new medium had taken over – television. The language had changed too.
In an article in Time magazine, Lance Morrow argues that if TV had been available during the American Civil War, the country may have been split into the United States and the Confederate states, with the struggle abandoned, and slavery might have lasted a lot longer.3
There can be no doubt that horrifying images beamed back from Vietnam had an influence and inflamed the anti-war protesters. If television had been available at Shiloh, Gettysburg, Bull Run or similar sites the reaction may have been similar.3
One thing that hasn’t changed with wars is the amount of quality literature that emerges at such times. With the American Civil War we have Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Red Badge of Courage by Tom Crane, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. From Vietnam came Chickenhawk by Robert Mason, If I die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, and The Killing Fields by Christopher Hudson. Films have also emerged – Platoon, All the Presidents’ Men, and Shenandoah.4
Another way of depicting wars in pictorial form at the time of the Civil War involved the use of line-drawings paintings and oil paintings such as the colourful one by James Walker showing the fall of San Mateo at Churubusco, during the Mexican War.2
Max Frankel (2003) in an article published in The New York Times discusses the merits of making a film that portrays the issues behind the release of the Pentagon Papers – highly confidential documents related to the Vietnam conflict and released to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg – and which resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision (New York Times V United States) against government censorship.5
Government censorship is common to a lot of conflicts. In the American Civil War, press representatives were banned from meetings. William Russell, having only witnessed the stampede of the Union army at Bull Run, had to return to England having failed to gain accreditation.1 That would never happen today, as can be seen from the latest Gulf War – where press representatives accompanied troops into battle situations. The spread of the railroads and the electric telegraph were already revolutionising communications, resulting in increased circulations, but the newspapers didn’t have everything their own way as The Draft Riots of 1863 prove.1
Satellite communications are also a heavy feature of war reporting in today’s world, by contrast the First World War was reported on film, whilst the Second World War was dominated by radio broadcasts. Germany used radio for propaganda purposes – Lord Haw-Haw being a classic example.6
A curious feature of the Civil War was the existence of Copperhead newspapers, hostile to the Lincoln administration, in Union held territory and which published defamatory articles about the government. Such editors found themselves imprisoned.1
In an article published by Henry Kissinger (1994) in the Economist he questions Lincoln’s motives in waging war. Was the war actually fought to preserve the Union? Or did Lincoln have darker motives? Was the war fought to prevent the Confederacy from becoming recognised by European powers “lest a multi-state system emerge on the soil of North America and with it the balance-of-power politics of European diplomacy.”7
The use of the video satellite phone in Afghanistan today and modern mobile phone networks are seen “as liberating a force in journalism as the internet has been”, according to Margaret Engel – managing editor of Newseum. 6 If such technologies had been available in earlier periods then who knows what outcomes would have ensued. Nobody can rewrite history. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn between General George Custer and the Sioux in 1876, perhaps Custer could have called in reinforcements to save the day if mobile technology had been available to him.
The furore over the Pentagon Papers was the root cause of Nixon’s paranoia with the press. The five men caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters were from Nixon’s re-election committee. Nixon compounded matters by paying the men ‘Hush Money’. His decision cost him the presidency.
Headlines of the day were very vocal:
LOS ANGELES TIMES

WATERGATE FORCES OUT NIXON AIDES

PRESIDENT ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY, VOWS THOROUGH PROBE
KLIENDIENST, EHRLICHMAN AND HALDEMAN QUIT; DEAN IS FIRED

DAILY NEWS

AGNEW QUITS

THE WASHINGTON POST

NIXON SAYS HE CALLED HUSH-MONEY ‘WRONG’1

The Washington Post deserves special mention at his juncture, because two of their reporters – Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – were instrumental in breaking the Watergate scandal. This was investigative reporting at its best, and the two reporters deserved the Pulitzer that they were awarded.1
However much television was beginning to dominate the media, newspapers still had an important role to play. Television pictures decided the fate of Vietnam, and Americans were horrified by images of the conflict being beamed into their homes. In 1967, images were broadcast that showed a North Vietnamese prisoners being shot brutally in the side of the head. Equally horrifying was Nick Ut’s photograph of screaming naked children fleeing a napalm attack. Images of the My Lai massacre didn’t help either. But the whole nature of Vietnam changed with the Tet offensive – a dogged push by North Vietnamese forces to turn the tide of war.
Vietnam had always had a turbulent history. The so-called ‘domino theory’ had influenced American foreign policy at the time; the belief that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, then so too would Cambodia, Laos, Burma, The Philippines, and other countries. Countries toppling like dominoes. French imperial power had collapsed in Indo-China by 1954, forcing the Americans to consider their options. What followed was a steady escalation of the crisis to all out war.
In 1967, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, sickened by the slaughter in Vietnam, ordered a top secret enquiry into the Vietnam conundrum, and it was from these reports that Daniel Ellsberg leaked his revelations to The New York Times. Ellsberg had already shown some of the documents to the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright, but months had passed without any follow through.
The leaks by Ellsberg were sensational. “Amongst other things, the first three instalments showed that for months before the so-called Tonkin Incident (where North Vietnamese gun-boats had allegedly fired, unprovoked, on two U.S. destroyers) which President Johnson had used as justification for escalating the war, America had been secretly conducting military operations against North Vietnam: that during the 1964 Presidential campaign, while Johnson was projecting an ‘acceptable’ image of caution and responsibility against Goldwater’s insistence on bombing the North, plans for an air war were actually in the process of being formulated: that the CIA had challenged the validity of the ‘domino theory’, and that America had deliberately sabotaged the Paris Conference on Laos.”
The Washington Post followed the lead of The New York Times in publishing extracts of this story, before the courts handed down injunctions, effectively gagging the press. The argument from the Nixon administration was that publication of The Pentagon Papers violated the espionage laws of the United States, and what lay at stake was the First Amendment and the newspapers’ rights to publish.1
In an article by Tony Mauro (2001) in USA TODAY, Mauro questions what a 21st century Ellsberg would have achieved with access to yet, another, new medium – the Internet. “…might have just loaded the Pentagon Papers onto a Web site and let the government read it at the same time as everyone else, but too late to close the barn door. The legal battle would have been fought on different grounds, if at all.”8
When comparing the two eras it is hard to visualise the scenario if the technologies of the time were reversed? Would the Lincoln administration have been as shrouded in secrecy as Nixon’s? Nixon was the only president in US history to quit office; his administration was a corrupt one. Abe Lincoln, on the other hand, was the quinessential American hero. Two very different men, two very different times. Lincoln won his war, Nixon did not. The only comparisons that can be concluded, aside from the great literature that such conflicts engender, are that newspapers covered both conflicts. The newspapers of today, though still breaking news, although not with the immediacy of television perhaps present more analysis, and in-depth reporting, of the issues that cause wars. The reasons for war, despite the constant news coverage, can be complex, and difficult to understand even in today’s modern society. One has only to look at the former Yugoslavia to realise this.
Perhaps the last word should go to Daniel Ellsberg (2002) writing in the final edition of USA Today, November 5th 2002: “Three decades later, Ellsberg answers with a Jeffersonian eloquence. “What we had come back to was a democratic republic – not an elected monarchy – a government under law, with Congress, the courts, and the press functioning to curtail executive abuses, as our Constitution envisioned”.9

5 Frankel, Max, 2003. The Stuff of Great Drama, If Only, The New York Times, 9th March 2003, Late Edition – Final Section 2, pg1, column 2, Arts and Leisure Desk
2 Ibid.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid
2 Ibid pg 190
1 Ibid
1 Ibid
1 Ibid
6 Ibid
1 Ibid
1 Ibid
1 Ibid
4 It’s mourning in America, The Economist, 3rd February 2001, U.S. Edition, Section, Books and Arts.
1 Jones, Michael Wynn, 1974. A Newspaper History of the World David & Charles: Newton Abbot
7 Kissinger, Henry, 1994. Balancing idealism and Realpolitik in diplomacy; Henry Kissinger weighs in. The Economist 14th May, 1994, Arts, Books and Sports Section pg93
9 Lyons, Stephen, 2002. Whistle blower wishes he had acted sooner, USA TODAY, 5th November, 2002, Final Edition, Life Section, pg5D.
8 Mauro, Tony, 2001. Pentagon Papers case resonate today, USA TODAY, 27th June, 2001, Final Edition pg 15A.
3 Morrow, Lance, 1992. Television Dances with the Reaper Time Magazine, US Edition, pg84.
2 Nevin, David, 1978. The Mexican War USA and Canada, Time-Life Books
6 Picture Perfect, 2001. The Economist, 20th October 2001, U.S. Edition, Science and Technology Section